● Big Brother ● “Burning of Books and Burying of Scholars” ● Massacre of Thessalonica and Ruination of Delphi by Emperor Theodosius ● The Libraries of Alexandria and Antioch, Nalanda (India) and the House of Wisdom (Baghdad) Burned Down ● The Desecration of Alexander’s Soma ● The Brutal Murder of Hypatia by Christians ● Crusades ● Colonialism and Slave Trade ● Genocide of the American Indians

NATURAL SELECTION, Charles Darwin’s revolutionary evolutionary theory, already a cornerstone of biology, does not apply to man-made creations which are instead “artificially selected” (censored), on the basis of ideological prejudice against non-conformist ideas. It seems that Big Brother has been omnipresent long before George Orwell’s 1984, burning not only libraries and books, but on many occasions the authors themselves, while “purifying” society and rewriting “history”. The motives of such crimes against humanity are rarely outright politico-economical; as a rule, they are disguised behind a religious mask – especially when this religion is monotheistic, that is, antagonistic to the other religions, authoritarian and, of course, power-hungry. Note that, among the monotheistic religions, Christianity is the unchallenged champion of such crimes. Here is a short list of the first phase:

“Βurning of books and burying of scholars”: late dynastic painting

The “burning of books and burying of scholars” campaign (213–210 BCE) during the Qin Dynasty of ancient China epitomizes this “war against freedom of thought and speech” that is still raging: all Chronicles except those by the Qin historians, the Classics of Poetry and History, and works of different schools, should be burned; and anyone discussing these books be executed. More than 460 scholars, or almost 1200 according to another count, were buried alive. Soon the campaign led to revolutions and war resulting to further damages of historical materials: the capital was sacked and burned in 207 BCE destroying also the officially sanctioned works which had been retained in the imperial library.

Epicurus’ book Established beliefs was burned in a Paphlagonian marketplace by order of a charlatan prophet (ca 160 CE).

The Christian emperor Jovian, who was given the “purple” (the crown, as they used to say of later kings) due to a misunderstanding in 363, reestablished Christianity as the official religion, ending the brief revival of Paganism under his predecessor, Julian the “Philosopher” or “Apostate” (depending on the religious outlook that reveals the priorities of each creed). Being under the influence of Athanasius of Alexandria, and moving from tolerance to bigotry, he subjected those who worshipped ancestral gods to the death penalty, and ordered the Library of Antioch to be burned down.

Omphalos of Gaia (navel of the Earth): Delphi with the Temple of Apollo (reconstruction)

Jovian did not have the time to complete his ‘mission’: he died (or was killed) half a year later. This task would be undertaken in a while by Iberian-born Theodosius I. His policy of tolerance in the beginning of his reign (379–395) gave way to bigotry. The turning point was probably the order to his troops to commit the abominable massacre of Thessalonica in 390, slaughtering at least 7,000 citizens in the Hippodrome, after they had rebelled against his Germanic mercenary garrison (see Chronicle 3). Ambrose, the archbishop of Milan, was quick to capitalize on this opportunity: he excommunicated Theodosius and thereby turned him into his obedient instrument. The emperor submitted himself completely to the Church and agreed to do public penance, promising to adopt a new role as the champion of the Christian faith. The result was the so-called “Theodosian decrees”, breaking up Pagan institutions and destroying their temples. The first act of his penance was perhaps the ruination of the Temple of Apollo and most of the statues and works of art in Delphi in the name of Christianity in the same year, 390. The sacred site was completely destroyed by Christian zealots in an attempt to obliterate all traces of Paganism, which was already proscribed, a “religio illicit”: Pagans would be sought out by informers, brought to court and in many cases executed. This “war on the infidels” was transferred to Alexandria the next year.

A scholar on a sarcophagus, 180-200 CE

In 391 the gigantic Serapeum together with what was left out of the Great Library of Alexandria were looted and burned by troops and Christian fanatics, at the decrees of Theodosius and archbishop Theophilus, who is described in Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as “the perpetual enemy of peace and virtue, a bold, bad man, whose hands were alternately polluted with gold and with blood.” Theophilus had discovered a hidden temple of Pagans and, together with his followers, mockingly displayed their sacred artifacts offending them enough to provoke an attack on the Christians. The latter counter-attacked, forcing the Pagans to retreat to the Serapeum. Theodosius gave Theophilus the go-ahead to destroy, and just asked him to avoid another massacre. Socrates Scholasticus, a contemporary Christian historiographer, states in his Ecclesiastical History that Theophilus “caused the Mithraeum to be cleaned out… Then he destroyed the Serapeum… The heathen temples… were therefore razed to the ground, and the images of their gods molten into pots and other convenient utensils for the use of the Alexandrian church.” The temples that were thus demolished could be declared “abandoned”, as the archbishop immediately noted in applying for permission to convert them into Christian churches – an act that must have received general sanction, for cave-like mithraea turned into crypts and temples forming the foundations of 5th century churches appear throughout the Roman Empire. Note that we know almost nothing about Mithraism, a religion contemporary with (and rival of) Christianism, practiced from about the 1st to 4th centuries CE. Standing triumphantly among the ruins, Theophilus looked around in search of his next enemy, turning against the followers of Origen and embarking on a paranoid campaign that killed 10,000 monks (the massacre was unavoidable, after all…)

City plan of ancient Alexandria with the four flashpoints framed in red: the Museum and the Library, the Serapeum, and somewhere between the “Soma” of Alexander

The destruction of the Serapeum was seen by many authors as representative of the triumph of Christianity over other religions (or the victory of a Jewish god over Hellenic, Roman, Egyptian, Persian, and other gods – and hence cultures); while that of the Library of Alexandria symbolized “knowledge and culture ruined”. The library held over half a million documents from Hellas, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, India, and many other countries, being part of a larger research institute, an ancient university, called the Musaeum (House of the Muses), where many of the most famous thinkers of the ancient world studied and worked, such as: Archimedes, the greatest genius of antiquity; Ctesibius, the father of pneumatics and inventor of the hydraulis or water organ, the precursor of the pipe organ; Euclid, the father of geometry; Hipparchus, the father of astronomy and founder of trigonometry; Hero, the father of mechanics and inventor of the first steam engine (aeolipile), who was a follower of the Atomists; Eratosthenes, who argued for a spherical earth and calculated its circumference, as well as the tilt of its axis, to near-accuracy; Aristarchus, who proposed the first heliocentric system of the universe; his case is an excellent example: his only extant work, On sizes and distances of the Sun and the Moon, is based on the geocentric model. The other book, where he proposed the alternative hypothesis of heliocentrism, is known only through citations by other scientists like Archimedes. Is this just a coincidence? Absolutely not!

Some more examples of the destruction of Pagan temples in the late 4th century, as recorded in surviving texts, are: the wider destruction of holy sites that spread rapidly throughout Egypt; the levelling of all the temples in Gaza; the destruction of temples in Syria; the destruction of temples and images in, and surrounding, Carthage; Martin of Tours’ attacks on holy sites in Gaul…

Reconstruction of the procession carrying Alexander’s body based on Diodorus‘ description

In this atmosphere of chaos and polarization, utmost decay and moral degradation, proclaimed as “the triumph of Christianity against idolatry”, the symbolism of a “Victorious Jesus” could never be totally overwhelming without the ‘defeat’ and ‘conquest’ of the invincible conqueror Alexander. The great king had died (probably poisoned) in Babylon in 323 BC. His body was en route to Macedon when it was hijacked by Ptolemy Soter for the prestige of having Alexander’s tomb in Egypt. The deceased, who had been declared “the son of Amon” by the god’s oracle at Siwa Oasis, asked shortly before his death to be buried there, in the temple of Zeus Amon, rather than alongside his actual father, Philip, at Aegae. Ptolemy Philopator built a magnificent mausoleum in Alexandria, inside a huge sacred precinct, known as Soma (Body), which became one of the most famous and sacred sanctuaries of the ancient world, for Alexander was worshiped as a god in the Macedonian and the Roman Empires – especially in the city he had founded, where he was like a patron. A large number of rulers and politicians, officers and officials, both Hellenes and Romans, paid their respects to Alexander visiting the mausoleum. Julius Caesar was the first Roman leader to go to the Soma, making a pilgrimage to the grave of his hero. Many others followed, from Augustus to Severus. However, the tomb was also looted by villains like Caligula, who removed the breastplate, and Caracalla, who took the tunic, ring, and belt in 215, while his troops were looting Alexandria for several days, slaughtering over 20,000 citizens, mainly young people, because of a satire produced in the city mocking his claims that he had killed his brother and co-emperor Geta in self-defense.

The Library in its heyday…

However, even during such a bloodbath and plunder, with the sole exception of those ‘pickpockets’ wearing the imperial purple, there was no real threat to Alexander’s Soma. Such a threat appeared in the next century. Ammianus Marcellinus relates that ca 361 Bishop George posed a rhetorical question to the people of Alexandria concerning the great and magnificent temple of the city’s genius: “How long will this tomb stand?”, he asked. By genius Ammianus meant the tutelary deity of the city and thence Alexander. Two years later, “in 363 George was killed for repeated acts of pointed outrage, insult, and pillage of the most sacred treasures of the city.” However, George was not alone. In 391 Theodosius declared illegal the veneration of Alexander, as well, together with all the other Pagan gods, and then, according to Alexandre Grandazzi’s Historia, “a violent Christian and anti-Pagan riot exploded leading to the destruction of the great temple of Serapis, and possibly reached… the Soma: an allusion… in a speech by the orator Libanius indicates that the body was removed from the tomb to be exposed publicly for the last time.” It seems that the body was hijacked for a second time and buried in a Christian manner because, according to the new dogma, it was to be interred, while the preceding practice of entombment was thought to be idolatrous. Everything referring to Paganism was then destroyed, while the burial of important, illustrious personages was no longer done in mausoleums but in Christian basilicas and underground. It is the time when the remains of Alexander “mysteriously” vanish. Already at the turn of the 4th and 5th centuries, John Chrysostom, another “enemy” of Theophilus, said in a sermon that the Macedonian king’s tomb was at that time “unknown to his own people”, in other words, to the Alexandrian Pagans. Some decades later Theodoret included Alexander in a list of famous men whose graves were lost.(*)

(*) There are a couple of references to a mosque or tomb of Alexander in Arabic texts dating from the 9th and 10th centuries. They probably allude to a mosque that was reconstructed from ancient architectural elements in the 11th century, where the empty sarcophagus of Alexander was found by Napoleon’s forces in 1798. Leo Africanus, who visited Alexandria around 1517, wrote:

“In the midst of the ruins of Alexandria, there still remains a small edifice, built like a chapel, worthy of notice on account of a remarkable tomb held in high honour by the Mohammedans; in which sepulchre, they assert, is preserved the body of Alexander the Great… An immense crowd of strangers come thither, even from distant countries, for the sake of worshipping and doing homage to the tomb, on which they likewise frequently bestow considerable donations.”

George Sandys, who visited Alexandria in 1611, was shown a sepulchre there, venerated as Alexander’s resting place. Whatever the fate of the tomb that was “mysteriously” lost again, these testimonies constitute a double defeat on Christianity: a) Alexander’s veneration continued either with or even without his body, despite its desecration; b) a comparison between the two monotheistic religions on this issue ends up overwhelmingly against Christianity.

Alexander the Great, mosaic,
by Alexandros Giannios

According to 21st century historians, among them Andrew Chugg, author of four books on Alexander, one entitled Alexander the Great, the Lost Tomb, there is a possibility that the embalmed body of the great Macedonian might be preserved in St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, where it has been mistakenly venerated as that of Mark the Evangelist! Mark had gone to Alexandria in 49 and founded the Church there, becoming its first bishop. However, there were Alexandrian Pagans who resented his efforts to turn them away from the worship of their traditional gods. In 68 they placed a rope around his neck and dragged him through the streets until he was dead (the mobs, you see, were not a Christian invention: they have been an essential and indispensable “tool” of each one ideology and every doctrine). When two Venetian merchants brought the mummy from Muslim Alexandria to Venice in the 9th century, the Doge ordered the so-called Chiesa d’Oro (Church of Gold) to be built next to his palace. The possession of a truly important relic would have serious political consequences. With a supposed evangelist on its territory, Venice acquired a status almost equal to that of Rome itself. During the construction of a new basilica in 1063, the relics “mysteriously” disappeared. According to tradition, Mark himself revealed the location of his remains in 1094 by extending his arm from a pillar to the doge of the time…
Since 1811 this mummy rests in a crypt under the altar of the church inside a marble sarcophagus on which there are also several Macedonian symbols. Copts, on the contrary, believe that Mark’s head remains in a church named after him in Alexandria, parts of his relics are in St Mark’s Cairo Cathedral, and the rest are in Venice. Nevertheless, there is one little detail: early Christian writers such as Dorotheus, Eutychius, and the author of the Chronicón Paschale say that Mark’s body was burned by the Pagans… A scientific study on these remains would reveal the secret of their origin. Radiocarbon dating would establish whether the body is old enough to match to that of Alexander. Likewise, it would be possible to reconstruct his facial features from the skull (wherever it is), and inspect the bones for signs of multiple injuries, particularly the one inflicted on Alexander’s chest when an arrow penetrated into his sternum… Do you really think there will be any Church officials who would ever allow such a study, putting at risk the Church’s history for History’s sake?

Hypatia, by Charles William Mitchell, brutally murdered
by a mob of fanatic monks inside the church that was…
“Saint” Cyril’s headquarters!

The Great Terror in Alexandria culminated in 415 with the brutal murder of the philosopher, mathematician and astronomer Hypatia, “a most beautiful, most vertuous, most learned, and every way accomplish’d Lady; who was torn to pieces by the Clergy of Alexandria, to gratify the pride, emulation, and cruelty of their Archbishop, commonly, but undeservedly, stil’d St. Cyril”, according to the philosopher John Toland. The astronomer Carl Sagan linked Hypatia’s death with the destruction of the celebrated library. The murder, symbolizing the end of Alexandria as a centre of wisdom and scholarship, was instigated by Theophilus’ nephew and successor, Cyril, the so-called “Pillar of Faith”, proclaimed as “Doctor of the Church”, and also canonized as… “Saint” (of all Christian denominations, while his uncle has been treated as a “saint” only by the Copts). Emperor Theodosius II instead described Cyril as a “proud pharaoh”.
Waging a power struggle with the governor of Alexandria, Orestes, he agitated a mob of 500 monks, a “Sturmabteilung” of fanatics, possessed “by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader [a minor cleric] named Peter”, Socrates Scholasticus testified. They “waylaid [Hypatia] returning home and, dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with ostraka [potsherds]. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them”… Of course, nothing was left from Hypatia’s writings.

The Caesareum was not just any church: it was “Saint” Cyril’s headquarters! And, of course, it was not a church but an ancient temple that was “sanctified” at the end of the 4th century when the Christians started appropriating the property of the other religions to obliterate all traces of them all around the world. The Caesareum was conceived by Cleopatra who wished to dedicate it to her lover, Marc Antony. It was finished by the man who “finished” them, Octavian Augustus, who dedicated it to… himself, after he obliterated all traces of Marc Antony not only in the temple but all around Alexandria…

Etrusca Disciplina, the Etruscan books of cult and divination, untouched by all ancient cultures, were collected and burned in the 5th century, a millennium after the Etruscans had ceased to exist as a tribe…

The Crusades were conducted under the sanction of the Catholic Church after the East – West Schism. Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade in 1095 with the declared goal of restoring Christian access to the area of Jerusalem. There followed six major Crusades against Muslim territories in the East and many minor ones as part of a 200-year struggle for control of the “Holy Land” that finally failed. After the fall of the last Christian stronghold in 1291, the Vatican mounted no further coherent response in the East. Many historians give equal importance to comparable, Papal-blessed military campaigns against “Pagans”, “heretics”, and “excommunicated” people, undertaken for a variety of economic, political, and religious reasons, such as the Albigensian Crusade, the Aragonese Crusade, the Northern Crusades, and the Iberian Reconquista. The “burning of books and heretics or infidels” was, of course, in the agenda of all Crusades. The conduct of the Crusaders was shocking not only to modern sensibilities but to European contemporaries, as well, for the Crusaders pillaged the countries in transit, and there was at least one case of cannibalism in the Levant! In the Rhineland the First Crusade resulted in the massacre of 8,000 Jews in the first of Europe’s pogroms. It also resulted in the slaughter of 70,000 citizens in the fall of Jerusalem. The nobles carved up the territory that they had gained rather than return it to the Byzantines, as they had vowed to do. Even worse, the Fourth Crusade resulted in the conquest and sacking of Constantinople, and the partition of the Byzantine Empire.

Nalanda, an ancient centre of higher learning with a great library in Bihar, India, was sacked by Turkic Muslim invaders from what is now southern Afghanistan in 1193. The university was so vast that it is reported to have burned for three months after the invaders set fire to it.

The House of Wisdom was a library, translation institute and research centre in Abbasid-era Baghdad. The scholars, primarily Persians and Greeks, translated all available scientific and philosophic Hellenic texts. Note that a great part of ancient Greek literature was transmitted to Europe thanks to these translations into Arabic. The House and all other libraries in the city were destroyed by the pro-Christian Mongol ruler Hulagu in 1258. It was said that the waters of the Tigris ran black for six months with ink from the enormous quantities of books flung into the river.

Pope Nicholas V may have tried to revive the spirit of the old Crusades in the East in 1452, one year before the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, as his nephew, Loukas Notaras, was the Byzantine Megas Doux (Grand Duke). However, the Europeans’ attention was already focused on the more promising opportunities opening up in the West. Thus, Nicholas’ papal bull, renewed repeatedly by future Pontiffs, granted Portugal (and later Spain) “full and free permission to invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens and Pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be, as well as their kingdoms… and other property… and to reduce their persons into perpetual slavery.” Effectively, these “geographically unlimited” bulls extended the Crusades’ legacy all over the world justifying European colonialism and, at the same time, “ushered in the West African slave trade”. This trade was about to take off very soon with the transport of African slaves to America, and the Vatican would continue “granting permissions” to guarantee its share.

During the 15th century, Muslim books were burned wholesale by Catholic Spain. About 5,000 Arabic poetic manuscripts were consumed by flames in the public square at Granada in 1499 on the orders of the Archbishop of Toledo. At the same time a number of Hebrew Bibles and other Jewish books were burned at the behest of the Spanish Inquisition.

Aztec Calendar

The Aztec emperor Itzcoatl, ruling from 1427-28 to 1440, ordered the burning of all historical codices for it was “not wise that all the people should know”… This allowed the development of a state-sanctioned “history” and mythos – but did not prevent the conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés in 1521. It was the starting point of a new era of genocides committed by Christians holding the sword in one hand and the cross in the other. The new crusaders and slave traders, together with the inquisitors, had new challenges to face, new frontiers to cross, new “books to burn and infidels to bury” in the “New World”, under the sanction and arbitration of the “Holy See” – with profit in mind, as always…

This intervening “Chronicle within a Chronicle”, I remind you, had Abdera of Andalusia as a starting point, during the revival of an ancient Periplus of Iberia in the previous Chronicle. We then voyaged to Abdera of Thrace and met its most celebrated citizen, Democritus. Plato’s hostility towards the atomist philosopher and his appeal to his students to destroy any Democritean work they could find, combined with the fact that no such work has survived, were more than a challenge for a “Periplus within a Periplus”, sailing in a sea the Big Brothers have tried to erase from the maps. The ocean of abuses is hidden there; we just gleaned some information on the initial period (until the time the first Spanish caravels crossed the Atlantic), limiting ourselves to cases of intentional crimes that came to our attention. A study in depth would reveal the Prince of Darkness himself…

What conclusions can we draw? An innocent person would expect to find the first traces of the idea of human rights in religions, especially the monotheistic ones, which should uphold the sanctity of human existence. In reality, the history of human rights finds traces of them in some legal codes of antiquity (Mesopotamia, Persia, India, Hellas, Rome), but not in the Bible, skipping Judaism and Christianity. The reason is that the ones who cared about such rights were the philosophers and not the prophets (with the exception of Muhammad who was obliged to deal with the subject). The kings who wanted to conquer the world, and the priests who wanted to conquer the mind, infringed as a rule on human rights. I think that if the Declaration of Human Rights and freedom of religion had been adopted and observed in the beginning of the Common Era, the only monotheists in the world today would be the Jews!

Reconstruction of Tenochtitlan: with a population of almost 300.000, it is believed it was the largest city in the world at that time, the capital of an empire of almost 5 million people. Compared to Europe, only Paris, Venice and Constantinople might have rivaled it. It was five times the size of the contemporary London. Entering the city, the Spaniards thought it was a dream. These were the “savages” that had to be Christianized and “civilized”…

THERE ARE TIMES in these Voyages and Chronicles, as in similar cases when you have to present a thesis and you need documentation, that you know in general terms beforehand what you are looking for while searching for clues. Some other times, however, the clew you have in hand to find your way in the labyrinth of history leads you to unexpected ends, “into harbours seen for the first time”; and then a desire is born to “stop at Phoenicianemporia… / and visit many Egyptian cities / to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars”, as Cavafy advises in his Ithaca. These are the happiest moments of a research. It happened exactly that when from the Aegeanemporia in the historical space of the Mediterranean I ended up following itinerant Minoan artists to distant lands! I felt I needed to set forth more information about these emporia after I had referred to Naucratis in the previous Chronicle, realizing that I already used this term several times in connection with colonies or trading posts; but the emporia were in fact neither colonies nor trading posts, though related to both. Writing in the Encyclopaedia of the Hellenic World on Commercial posts and harbours, Elias Petropoulos tried to clear things out:

The term emporion denoting a colony or a type of settlement first appears in ancient literature rather late, during the 5th century BC. According to some scholars, the emporion should be understood as the locale of the emporos (that is, merchant), i.e. the person who travels to buy and sell commodities. The word emporos etymologically originates from the preposition en and the word poros (which means sea route). This word appears in theOdysseyof Homer twice. In both these cases the epic poet obviously means a private individual who travels for professional reasons. So we could suppose that the word emporion originates from the word emporos. This word does not appear on [Mycenaean] Linear B tablets, and this is rather surprising, but it also leads to the obvious conclusion that this word was coined at a later time. Scholarship on the subject argues that the word or the term emporion (in the sense of a colony or settlement and not that of a simple commercial transaction or exchange of products) appears first in writing in the works of Herodotus in the mid-5th century BC. By the 4th century BC the word is found on an inscription known as ‘the inscription of Pistiros’ which has been unearthed quite recently in a settlement of the modern-day Bulgarian (ancient Thracian) hinterland, close to Philippopolis…

Emporion < Emporos (merchant) < en + poros = one who is on a sea route

According to information coming from Herodotus’ fourth book of theHistories[entitledMelpomene], the Black Sea was home to several emporia, which is the precise word the historian uses to define these settlements… There are also more scattered references to emporia in the other eight books of Herodotus’ work. These are emporia located outside the Black Sea, and are situated in the Mediterranean. Of all these, the case of Naucratis causes puzzlement: the historian refers to it using both the terms emporion and polis(that is, city). Many studies have dealt with this issue, but unfortunately we still cannot determine the early nature of this settlement with certainty. The term usually understood as the opposite of emporion is apoikia (that is, colony), which is considered as a complete form of settlement in the model of the ancient Greek cities, i.e. a settlement featuring a distinct form of political and social organization. A colony was a settlement obviously established in the context of a predetermined plan of action and was carried out under the auspices of a god (or gods) with every formality on the part of the metropolis, possessing an agricultural hinterland and its own coinage… However, in some cases, the emporion may be characterized as a proto-polis or a proto-settlement, in the sense that it can act as the early stage in the establishment of a colony or a city.

Emporia (sing. emporion, or emporium in Latin), according to Wikipedia, were places which the traders of one people had reserved to their business interests within the territory of another people. Famous emporia in Egypt, except Naucratis, included Avaris and Sais, where the Athenian legislator Solon went in 590 BCE to acquire the knowledge of the Egyptians. Similar emporia were founded in the Levant, such as Al-Mina and Posideion in Syria. Sais (Σάϊς, or Zau in ancient Egyptian) was located in the Western NileDelta. The city’s patron goddess was Neith. The Greeks, such as Herodotus, Plato and Diodorus Siculus, identified her with Athena and hence postulated a primordial link to Athens. Diodorus recounts that Athena built Sais before the deluge that supposedly destroyed Athens and Atlantis. While all Hellenic cities were destroyed during that cataclysm, the Egyptian cities survived. In Plato’s Timaeusand Critias(around 395 BCE), a priest in Sais entrusted to Solon the story of Atlantis, its military aggression against Greece and Egypt, and its eventual defeat and destruction by natural catastrophe.(a)

(a) The story of Atlantis is most probably connected with the Sea Peoples’ raids and the consequent Bronze Agecollapse. This should have been the “cataclysm” that destroyed Hellas, while Egypt barely survived… (See mainly Chronicle 5).

Taureador: Fresco fragment from Avaris, 16th BCE

Avaris (Αὔαρις, today’s Tell el-Dab’a), the capital of Egypt under the CanaaniteHyksos, was also located in the Nile delta in the northeastern region. Its position at the hub of Egypt’s emporia made it a major administrative and commercial centre. Excavations have shown that there was a busy harbour catering to over 300 ships during a trading season. Artifacts inside the precinct of the palace, possibly a temple, have produced goods from all over the Aegean world. Most impressively, there were even Minoan-like wall paintings similar to those found in Crete at the Palace of Knossos. It is speculated that there was close contact with the rulers of Avaris, whoever they were, and the large building representing the frescoes allowed the Minoans to have a ritual life in Egypt. French archaeologist Yves Duhoux also proposed the existence of a Minoan colony on an island in the Nile delta.

Minoan Ladies in Blue fresco, ca 1525-1450 BCE

Outside of the Aegean, only three sites have an indisputable record of Minoan civilization, one being Avaris in Lower Egypt, the others Kabri and Alalakh in the Levant. Kabri, in Palestine near the Lebanese border, is notable for its Minoan style wall paintings. In the summer of 2009, more Aegean style frescoes were found at the site. Apparently, the Canaanite rulers of the city wished to associate with Mediterranean culture and not adopt Syrian and Mesopotamian styles of art like other cities in Canaan did. Alalakh was a late Bronze Age city-state in the area where SeleucidAntioch was to be founded at the end of the 4th century BCE. It was occupied from before 2000 BCE, when the first palace was built, and likely destroyed in the 12th century by the Sea Peoples, as were many other towns of coastal Anatolia and the Levant. The city was never reoccupied, the nearby port of Al-Mina taking its place during the Iron Age.

Al-Mina (“The Port” in Arabic) is the name given by archaeologist Leonard Woolley to this ancient trading post in the estuary of the Orontes. According to Woolley, it was an early Hellenic trading colony, founded a little before 800 BCE in direct competition with the Phoenicians to the south. Large amounts of Greek pottery established its early Euboean connections, while the Syrian and Phoenician ware reflected a cultural mix typical of an emporium. The controversy whether Al-Mina is to be regarded as a native Syrian site, with local architecture and pots and a Hellenic presence, or as a Greek trading post, has not been resolved. Al-Mina served as an entrepôt for cultural influences that accompanied trade with Urartu and Assyria through the shortest caravan route. Pottery recovered from later levels after 700 BCE shows that a Hellenic presence endured through the 4th century BCE with pottery imported from Miletus and deftly imitated locally, apparently by Greek potters. Al-Mina is a key to understanding the role of early Hellenes in the East at the outset of the Orientalizing period of Greek cultural history. Robin Lane Fox has made a case for the Hellenic name of the site to have been Potamoi Karon mentioned by Diodorus Siculus; he suggestively linked it to karu (“trading post”) in an Assyrian inscription, which would give “Rivers of Emporia”.

Woolley identified Al-Mina with Herodotus’ and Strabo’s Posideion, but more recent scholarship places the latter at Ras al-Bassit, located 53 kilometres north of Latakia (the Hellenistic Laodicea) on the Mediterranean Sea. Excavations revealed a small settlement back to the late Bronze Age, when it may have functioned as an outpost of Ugarit to the south. Unlike Ugarit, Bassit survived to the passage of the Sea Peoples and into the Iron Age. It had strong links with Phoenicia and Cyprus, and a Greek presence was attested from the 7th century BCE. Posideion expanded and its acropolis was fortified in the Hellenistic period.

One of the two figurines Ram in a Thicket. The excavation at Ur was a joint venture of the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania sharing the booty!

Woolley began work at Al-Mina in 1936, after the excavation at Ur in Mesopotamia, where he discovered Sumerian royal tombs of great wealth. He decided to work by the Mediterranean coast because he was interested in finding ties between the Aegean and the Mesopotamian civilizations, and wished to throw light, as he wrote, “upon the development of Cretan civilization and its connections with the great civilizations of Nearer Asia”. Disappointed in not finding a Bronze Age port at Al-Mina, he soon moved his interests to the earlier, more urbane site of Alalakh, where he worked before and after World War II (1937-39 and 1946-49). It seems, however, that his “view” was anything but “impartial”, for he, too, was “spectacled” wearing “Asiatic myopic glasses”. The clues on the “connections” he was interested in were there, of course; but, having already in mind an elaborate scenario, and possibly a hidden ambition to turn Arthur Evans’ work in Crete upside down, he led himself to erroneous conclusions. If Ur had been his Austerlitz, Alalakh turned out to be his Waterloo! His failure to interpret his findings correctly should be taught in every School of Archaeology and help every equally short-sighted scholar learn his/her lesson.(b)

Lawrence (left) and Woolley at Carchemish

(b) Sir Charles Leonard Woolley (1880-1960) has not been an ordinary archaeologist. Best known for his excavation at Ur, and knighted in 1935 for his contributions to his discipline, he is considered as one of the first “modern” archaeologists. Volunteered by Arthur Evans to run the excavation on a Roman site in Northern England, Woolley began his career there in 1906, later admitting that “I had never studied archaeological methods even from books… and I had not any idea how to make a survey or a ground-plan”. He worked with T. E. Lawrence, the later famous “Lawrence of Arabia”, on the excavation of the Hittite city of Carchemish in 1912-14. His work at Ur that began in 1922 led to the discovery of the royal tombs and inspired Agatha Christie in writing the novel Murder in Mesopotamia. The writer later married his assistant, Max Mallowan. Woolley was one of the first archaeologists to propose that the “great deluge” of the Bible was a local flood after identifying a flood-stratum at Ur of “…400 miles long and 100 miles wide; but for the occupants of the valley that was the whole world”…

Having already in mind an elaborate scenario, and possibly a hidden ambition to turn Arthur Evans’ work in Crete upside down, Woolley led himself to erroneous conclusions. If Ur had been his Austerlitz, Alalakh turned out to be his Waterloo! His failure to interpret his findings correctly should be taught in every School of Archaeology.

The uniqueness and seeming suddenness of the emergence of the Cretan palace system in the Aegean has often been explained by connections with and influences from the older advanced civilizations of the ancient Near East. In Alalakh… Woolley thought to have found what he had looked for: in Yarim-Lim’s palace he recognized “unmistakable connections” with Minoan Crete. Similar building techniques… as well as frescoes “identical in colouring, technique and style” at Alalakh and Knossos led him to the conclusion that “there can be no doubt but that Crete owes the best of its architecture, and its frescoes, to the Asiatic mainland” and that “we are bound to believe that trained experts, members of the Architects’ and Painters’ Guilds, were invited to travel overseas from Asia (possibly from Alalakh) to build and decorate the palaces of the Cretan rulers”.

“There can be no doubt but that Crete owes the best of its architecture, and its frescoes, to Asia… Trained experts, members of the Architects’ and Painters’ Guilds, were invited to travel overseas from Asia to build and decorate the palaces of the Cretan rulers”. (Leonard Woolley)

Charging bull and olive tree, relief in Knossos

Woolley’s main argument for this theory, which has been accepted by eminent scholars[!],(c) was that “Yarim-Lim’s palace antedates by more than a century the Cretan examples in the same style”… However, after a long debate on “Alalakh and Chronology”, Woolley’s date [“between circa 1780 and 1730 BC”] proved to be too high. Yarim-Lim of Alalakh was not – as Woolley had thought – Yarim-Lim I of Yamhad, the contemporary of the great Hammurapi of Babylon, but a younger brother of King Abban of Yamhad who gave Alalakh to him as an appanage principality…(d) The dates recently proposed by different scholars lie between ca. 1650 and 1575 BC. In regard to architecture… the evidence is far from substantiating Woolley’s theory of Near Eastern architects working in Crete… The orthostates of Alalakh are ca. 300 years later than the orthostates of the first phase of the Old Palace at Phaistos… Fragments of wall paintings from Yarim-Lim’s palace show characteristic Minoan motifs which appear contemporary or even earlier in Crete. Moreover, the sense of movement detectable in the wall-painting fragments from Yarim-Lim’s palace is characteristically Minoan and in opposition to Near Eastern tradition.

(d) There were three kings of Yamhad under the name of Yarim-Lim and, of course, far more local rulers having the same name, such as the one in Alalakh. Woolley – more than anyone else – should have known better before he wrote that “Crete owes the best of its architecture, and its frescoes, to the Asiatic mainland”…

Papyrus fresco on Thera

Woolley’s strongest argument for a direct connection between the Alalakh paintings and those in Crete was that they both were executed in true fresco painting on wet lime plaster. But it is exactly this fact which definitely disproves Woolley’s theory of the Near Eastern ancestry of Cretan fresco painting. Until most recently the Alalakh frescos formed the only known example of true fresco painting on the ancient Near East. In Crete, true fresco painting is known at least from ca. 1900 BC on. Thus true fresco painting apparently has been first invented on Crete, probably because it was suitable to the temperament of the Minoan artists. Thus, technique, style and iconography of the fresco fragments from the Yarim-Lim palace at Alalakh indicate that their resemblances to the Cretan wall-paintings worked in the reverse direction as that originally thought by Woolley.

“The sense of movement detectable in the wall-painting fragments is characteristically Minoan and in opposition to Near Eastern tradition… Technique, style and iconography indicate that their resemblances to the Cretan wall-paintings worked in the reverse direction as that thought by Woolley… Kabri and Alalakh do not have only single Minoan motifs foreign to ‘Greater Canaan’ but they show a purely Minoan iconography as well as technique. This can only mean they were executed by travelling Minoan artisans.” (Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier)

There is much evidence that Cretan objects of art were highly valued in the ancient Near East. In the Mari tablets Cretan imports are mentioned… The prestige character of the Cretan objects in the Mari texts is indicated by the fact that two of them were presented by King Zimri-Lim of Mari to other Mesopotamian Kings. As finds of Kamares pottery at Ugarit, Qatna, Byblos and Hazor demonstrate, this outstanding pottery was highly esteemed in the Levant. Thus, at least from the 19th century BC on, Crete within its relations to the Levant was not only the receiver but developed into an equal partner producing works of art for which there was a great demand in the Near East.(e) These Cretan works of art arrived by some kind of exchange or trade in the Levant. But, as Woolley has stated, “one cannot export a palace on board of a ship, nor is the ‘art and Mystery’ of fresco-working a form of merchandise”.(f)Do we therefore have to reconstruct just the reverse scenario as that suggested by Woolley, i.e. Cretan artisans travelling to Alalakh for painting the frescoes there?

(e) I ignore the Levantine contribution to the Minoan civilization and, unfortunately, Niemeier gives no information on the subject. What I do know is how much the Cretans were indebted to, and how much they were benefited by learning from, the Egyptians (see Chronicle 2). I can also imagine how much the Egyptians would have benefited if they were not so stuck-up to let themselves learn from the Cretans…

(f) I used a similar argument to show the necessity of Hellenic presence in Iberia: “What the Phoenician ships could not transport and, therefore, made the Greek presence absolutely necessary in Iberia, was Hellenic culture, art, ideas, architectural models, burial habits, and so on” (see Chronicle 7).

Knossos: the Throne Room with the griffins reconstructed

In “Greater Canaan”… there are two other sites which can contribute to the problem: Qatna and Tel Kabri.(g) Fragments of wall-paintings from the palace at Qatna show [techniques] in the characteristic Aegean manner. Tel Kabri lay on one of the most important trade routes of the ancient Near East, the later so-calledVia Maris [Way of the Philistines]…(h)In the palace of the local ruler… a threshold was plastered and painted with… similar floor-techniques and designs of the Minoan palaces but not from the Ancient Near East… There is evidence that the walls of this room were also covered with painted plaster of which unfortunately only tiny fragments have been preserved. The plaster floor has been painted in true fresco technique… found also in Cretan and Theran fresco painting but not in tempera and fresco secco. The colours in the floor’s painting are… very similar to those of Cretan and of Theran wall-painting… Originally the floor… imitated the slabs of a stone pavement… ln Crete painted plaster floors imitating slab-paved floors are known from [ca 2000 BCE]. Other parts of the Kabri floor were decorated with floral motifs. Among them are chains of stylized linear iris blossoms of a characteristic Minoan type which occurs first in frescoes and vase-painting [in 1700-1500 BCE]. Such kind of decorative mixture is a characteristic feature of Minoan fresco painting… The Kabri floor and also the fresco fragments from Yarim-Lim’s palace at Alalakh do not have only single Minoan motifs foreign to “Greater Canaan” which could be explained as intrusive or incorporated elements arriving by motif transfer, but they show a purely Minoan iconography as well as technique. This can only mean that they were executed by travelling Minoan artisans…

(g) Greater Canaan: “the area between the Amuq plain [where Antioch was later built] to the north and the deserts to the south and to the east for the middle and late Bronze Age… appears to form a largely uniform civilization with regional variations.” (Ruth Amiran).

The excavations at Kabri were directed by Aharon Kempinski and Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier.

(h) The historical name of the road, sadly for the IsraeliJews, was Way of the Philistines because it crossed through the Philistine plain, where the Gaza Strip is. Via Maris was “fished up” out of Vulgate – “via maris”, meaning “by the way of the sea” – without specifying any road (there was no such Roman term denoting a road anywhere). The modern name was adopted so as to expel the Palestinians from their homeland even on archaeological terms…

La Petite Parisienne de Crète…

We have evidence for exchange of information on the equipment of the palaces within the ancient Near East (to which Minoan Crete belonged in a certain sense as a westernmost member). That Cretans actually travelled to the Levantine coast is proved by a tablet from the Mari archives mentioning a Cretan who purchases tin at Ugarit from agents of the Mari palace. A tale in the mythological poetry of Ugarit is of highest interest in our context. In it the goddess Anat is sending the divine messenger over the sea to the god of handicrafts, Kothar wa-Khasis, who is brought from his throne in Kptr (almost unanimously identified as Caphtor = Crete)(i) to build a splendid palace for god Baal and to furnish it with precious works of art. As Arvid Schou Kapelrud has stated, Kothar is “the master-builder and the master-smith as he is found in the Near Eastern courts of this time, a highly skilled specialist”. In Canaanite mythology the god of handicrafts was called from Crete to furnish the palaces of the deities with precious works of art; in reality the rulers of Tel Kabri (Rehov) and Alalakh (and other cities, possibly Qatna) asked the rulers of Crete for sending artisans to decorate their palaces with fresco painting. As has been demonstrated by Carlo Zaccagnini, the sending of specialized workers is well-attested in the framework of the diplomatic relations between the rulers in the ancient Near East, their transfers are inserted into the dynamics and formal apparatus of the practice of gift-exchange.

(i) “KPTR” may be identified with “Caphtor”; but the latter’s equation with Crete is the least probable scenario. Biblical Caphtor may refer to: a) Pelusium in the Nile Delta; b) Cilicia; c) Cyprus; and d) Crete (see Chronicle 5). Egypt is also indicated here because in all references to Kothar, except the above-mentioned poetic tale, his abode is identified as “HKPT”, read perhaps as “Hikaptah”, or “House of the ka (soul) of Ptah”, that is, Memphis. The Hellenes pronounced this Hikaptah as Aegyptos, hence the name of the country in many languages.

Minoan fresco frieze at Avaris reconstructed

After the discoveries in Alalakh and Kabri, the Minoan frescoes in Avaris excavated by Manfred Bietak“instantly created much sensation, since among the scenes depicted on them are spectacular representations of bull leaping so closely identified with Minoan cult and culture”, Wolf-Dietrich and Barbara Niemeier commented in another paper on Minoan Frescoes in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Minoan gold ring depicting bull leaping

“From 1990 on, we suggested that the Kabri and the Alalakh frescoes were painted by travelling Aegean specialists, and [some time later] Bietak and Nanno Marinatos did the same for the Avaris frescoes”. There is a minor problem among archaeologists on the date of these frescoes. Wishing perhaps to please everyone, “Bietak and Marinatos came to the conclusion that ‘Minoan wall painting existed in Avaris both during the late Hyksos period and the early 18th [Thutmosid] Dynasty’. Bietak himself had regarded as possible that ‘trade… links between Avaris and Crete… might have survived a dynastic change and might have carried on into the 18th Dynasty, even after the fall of the Hyksos.’ There is indeed enough evidence from history that the kind of diplomatic and economic relations which apparently are behind these fresco paintings can survive the changes of regimes. According to Bietak, ‘king Ahmose, the founder of the 18th Dynasty, fits particularly well into the picture of Minoan connections.’ He imagines the possibility of a political deal between Ahmose and the ‘Minoan Thalassocracy’ in which the Minoan fleet helped Ahmose – who had no fleet – against the danger still threatening from the Hyksos harbour bases in southern Palestine. There is no archaeological or textual evidence for the latter hypothesis, and it recalls rather imaginative and today forgotten scenarios connected with the expulsion of the Hyksos, like those according to which Mycenaean mercenaries helped Ahmose in evicting the Hyksos, or according to which fugitive Hyksos princes conquered the Argolid and subsequently were buried in the Shaft Graves at Mycenae. Moreover, Ahmose already had a fleet: he captured Avaris after a series of assaults by both land and water [and then] proceeded to southern Palestine.”

Ahmose fighting back the Hyksos

Even a pharaoh with a fleet of his own would surely prefer to have the far more experienced Cretan navy by his side than against him allied with the Hyksos! The Avaris paintings indicate an involvement of Egypt in international relations and cultural exchanges with the eastern Mediterranean either through exchange of gifts or even marriage. They additionally point to Minoan authority as being involved in Egyptian affairs possibly because Crete had a strong naval force to offer the pharaoh, and also to Avaris as a place where these cultural exchanges took place, meaning the city was incredibly important to Egypt.

The marriage of a Minoan princess to an Egyptian pharaoh may be one possible scenario. Bietak has suggested that the Avaris frescoes were painted by Minoan artists belonging to the entourage of a Knossian princess married to the pharaoh, whom he first identified as a Hyksos ruler, then as Ahmose, and much later as Thutmose III. Indeed, who was the Cretan girl’s groom? The Thera eruption around 1600 BCE happened in the middle of the Hyksos period (1650–1550). Thus, most probably a royal wedding in the final years of the Hyksos in Egypt must be ruled out. There follows Ahmose with his New Kingdom, when the Egyptians considered the Aegean to be part of their “empire”. The term must not be understood literally, for in the land of the Nile they misinterpreted even the gifts given to the pharaohs: “The Egyptians, with their characteristic egocentric sense of superiority, would have presented such gifts as tribute” (A. R. Schulman). At any rate, “Ahmose fits particularly well into the picture of Minoan connections”. Thutmose could well be the groom, as well. Besides, we know that he had three foreign wives: Menwi, Merti, and Menhet. However, there was a problem: one more dynastic change that took place during his reign, in the middle of the 15th century BCE, not in Egypt but in Crete, when the Minoans were put under the yoke of their own “Hyksos” (foreign rulers), the Mycenaeans. Therefore, if there was a wedding, it should have happened in the beginning of Thutmose’s reign, when the real pharaoh was his stepmother, Hatshepsut.

Theran rosettes

Whatever the motives, these unique wall paintings are of Minoan style, technique, and content. There is a long frieze of bull-leaping and grappling against a maze pattern. Marinatos has made the case that the rosette motif, a prominent feature of the Taureador paintings, reproduces the Knossian rosettes and that it is a distinct Minoan symbol. The frescoes also depict griffins, hunting scenes, felines chasing ungulates, several life-sized figures, and a white female wearing a skirt. Especially important are the emblems of the Minoan palace such as the half rosette frieze and the presence of big griffins which are the same size as the ones in the throne room at Knossos. The technique of the paintings is typically Aegean, while the style is very high quality and compares with some of the best paintings from Crete. According to Bietak, the use of specific Minoan royal motifs in a palace of Avaris indicates “an encounter on the highest level must have taken place between the courts of Knossos and Egypt,” while the large representation of the female in the skirt might suggest a political marriage between the pharaoh and a Minoan princess.

“Dynastic intermarriage was a favoured diplomatic tactic in the Bronze Age Near East,” the Niemeiers point out. The entourage of a foreign princess, some scholars estimate, “would comprise several hundred people, who until the end of their lives remained in the harem of the pharaoh, and that one can well imagine that at Avaris the rooms of the foreign princess and her entourage were decorated according to her desires. [However], at Alalakh and Tel Kabri, the frescoes probably had been attached to the walls of major ceremonial (and possible ritual) halls of the palace, not of the private rooms of queens or princesses.”

Wild duck on Thera

The technique of using lime plaster in two layers with a highly polished surface, fresco in combination with stucco, all are techniques that are not Egyptian but are first seen in Minoan paintings. Also, the colours used by the artists are clearly Minoan. Using blue instead of grey e.g. is Minoan, with that colour convention being seen in Egypt later, and due to Aegean influences. Besides, there are no Egyptian hieroglyphs or emblems among any of the fragments discovered. The composition of the paintings and motifs also fit in perfectly with those of the Aegean world. Thus the overwhelming evidence seems to point in the direction of Minoan artists having been at work in Avaris.

“The differences between the styles of Egyptian and Minoan arts have been analyzed by Henriette Antonia Groenewegen-Frankfort and, most recently, by Bietak,” the Niemeiers remark. “According to Groenwegen-Frankfort, Minoan art differs from Egyptian (and ancient Near Eastern) art in its ‘absolute mobility in organic forms’. Bietak aptly explains this with the different cultural patterns of both civilizations. The Minoan society was not – as the Egyptian one – dominated by writing, listing, and absolute order, and therefore Minoan art was not subjected to hieroglyphic clichés and a rigid canonical order. As to a comparison of Canaanite and Minoan arts, we unfortunately do not have many objects of art from the middle Bronze Age Levant. But those which are extant show a style distinctly different from the Minoan one. For instance, the bird representations on bone inlays from Megiddo and Lachish seem motionless in comparison to the crane on an ivory plaque from Palaikastro. Canaanite female and male metal figurines appear stiff in comparison to the Minoan female and male metal figurines displaying strong inner tension and dynamics.”

“Minoan art differs from Egyptian (and ancient Near Eastern) art in its ‘absolute mobility in organic forms’.” (H.A. Groenewegen-Frankfort)
“The Minoan society was not – as the Egyptian one – dominated by writing, listing, and absolute order, and therefore Minoan art was not subjected to hieroglyphic clichés and a rigid canonical order.” (M. Bietak)

The Fertile Crescent (that also includes the Nile valley and delta): the cradle of civilization in the time of the Bronze Age collapse
(arrows pinpoint all the places mentioned in this Chronicle)

As it turned out the wall paintings in Avaris, Alalakh, Kabri, possibly Qatna (17th-16th centuries BCE), were not the older ones.

“Earlier are the painted stone imitations in Zimri-Lim’s palace at Mari [18th century BCE]. The excavator of Mari, André Parrot, compared the stone imitations to those at Knossos. He also asked for possible connections between the Mari and the Knossos murals, and, pointing to the evidence for their connections provided by the Minoan precious objects mentioned in the Mari archives, he apparently tended to see some Cretan influence in the murals there.”

Located in Mesopotamia, far from the sea, Mari (modern Tell Hariri) was a Sumerian and Amorite city on the Euphrates. It flourished from 2900 until 1759 BCE, when it was sacked by Hammurabi, despite the gifts the king Zimri-Lim had given him. More important was Mari’s strategic position as a relay point between lower Mesopotamia and northern Syria. The city came to control the trade lanes between different regions such as Iran, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia. The royal palace contained over 300 rooms and was possibly the largest of its time. More than 25,000 tablets were recovered there “bringing about a complete revision of the historical dating of the ancient Near East and providing more than 500 new place names, enough to redraw the geographical map of the ancient world,” as Parrot noted. Qatna (modern Tell el-Mishrife), 18 km northeast of Homs, was also one of the largest Bronze Age towns in Syria. In the 2nd Millennium trade routes developed connecting Mesopotamia with Cyprus, Crete and Egypt. Qatna is mentioned in the tin trade, which went from Mari via Qatna to the Mediterranean; Cypriote copper was transported in the other direction; their alloy, bronze, was most valuable especially during the Bronze Age.

Theran boy-boxers

As for the ethnic composition of the “Minoan” workshops, there are various possibilities: the frescoes were painted a) by travelling Aegean artisans; b) under the supervision of Aegean artists with the assistance of Levantine painters trained by them; c) by Levantine pupils of Aegean masters. The idea of mixed workshops seems more appealing, probable and realistic. Decorating huge palaces was a great undertaking. However, it would seem unthinkable to imagine Cretan ships full of artists travelling around the Mediterranean for this task. The artistic teams should have been rather small necessarily working with local apprentices.

“It is difficult to decide in each case which of these solutions is the correct one,” according to the Niemeiers. “We would agree with Philip P. Betancourt that only a very small percentage of the fresco paintings is known and that ‘we are touching the tip of the iceberg of a whole series of interrelated workshops, working in Knossos, the Aegean islands, on the coast of Western Asia and in Egypt, perhaps travelling back and forth, perhaps occasionally exchanging personnel or going back to Knossos to learn the most recent things’… The Alalakh, Tel Kabri, and Avaris frescoes are to be seen ‘in terms of the forging of an élite koiné [common ‘idiom’] – artistic, iconographical, ideological, technological – in the circumstances of the intense maritime interaction between the coastal Areas of the Eastern Mediterranean’,” as S. Sherratt proposed. Marinatos has also argued that these paintings are evidence of a koiné, a visual language of common symbols, which testifies to interactions among the rulers of neighbouring powers. “The Minoan artists involved in the painting of all these frescoes”, the Niemeiers agree, “apparently formed an important element in the growth of the so-called ‘International Style’ of the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean.”

And not only of the eastern part of mare nostrum, I would add: according to some fresco experts, similar Minoan-style wall paintings have also been found in Morocco…

There was “a whole series of interrelated workshops, working in Knossos, the Aegean islands, on the coast of Western Asia and in Egypt, perhaps travelling back and forth, perhaps occasionally exchanging personnel or going back to Knossos to learn the most recent things.” (P.P. Betancourt)
The frescoes are to be seen “in terms of the forging of an élite koiné – artistic, iconographical, ideological, technological – in the circumstances of the intense maritime interaction between the coastal areas of the eastern Mediterranean.” (S. Sherratt)

Cretans in Egypt, bringing gifts of metal, jewelry etc, facsimile of a painting in Thebes, 18th dynasty,
early 15th century BCE

Whatever happened to the Avaris wall paintings? One group of them had fallen off the wall of a doorway, and the other group of fragments was found in dumps deposited by the north-east palace. The frescoes seem to have been removed during the later Thutmosid period – when there was no Minoan Crete anymore.

“Minoan fresco painting apparently was a rather short-lived phenomenon in the Levant and Egypt – in Egyptian terms, covering the Hyksos period and the very beginning of the early 18th Dynasty,” the Niemeiers sum up. “Later, we find again paintings of nature scenes which appear to breathe a Minoan spirit. They were, however, executed in secco technique and certainly were not painted by Aegean artists. Minoan wall painting was a thing of the past at that time.”

Without Minoan Crete there was no room for Minoan art. The Minoan workshops were still busy, of course; but the artistic masters worked for the new political masters, the Mycenaeans; there were no Greek artists at that time to compete with them. However, their new works of art are not typified as “Minoan” anymore; they are called “Mycenaean”, sometimes accompanied with a footnote that they were made by Cretan artistic workshops. Would anyone ever think to describe as “Cretan” the masterpieces of another great Cretan master who lived more than three millennia later, namely Doménicos Theotocópoulos, the famous El Greco?

Mycenaean women procession fresco

Here we are again at our starting point, having completed the circle that began with Periplus and Minoan thalassocracy and ended with Emporia and Minoan painting. Now we can start anew, going back even before our starting point – before man learned how to work metals, when voyages were made in search of an equally valuable material: the obsidian. Let us go back to the Neolithic era! Let’s try at least…

“It is not only a seductive idea but it makes a reasonable hypothesis, for the Minoans were good navigators, traders, and seekers of metals. Had they known anything of the Iberian Peninsula they might well have been attracted; however, while it is quite possible that the Mediterranean island route to the west was used by them (Rhys Carpenter, The Greeks in Spain), as yet there is no convincing evidence that it was. The excavations of Almerían culture at Los Millares, which may be dated as of 2000-1800 BC, presented certain items reminiscent of Aegean cultures, but there is no evidence that would clearly demonstrate connection. Such items may represent nothing more than casual parallelism. Other finds of a somewhat later period in Spain make better evidence of contact with the eastern Mediterranean lands, for they can be neatly equated with materials of Egyptian Tell-el-Amarna of 1400-1200 BC. The Egyptian trade items of this period of time are well known to Spanish archaeology and almost surely may be associated with Phoenician intermediaries. As of the present date, such items may be taken as the earliest evidence of direct contact between Iberia and the eastern Mediterranean navigators.”

Hellenes in Iberia: Athena, Atlas, and Heracles with the golden apples of the Hesperides; marble relief, 5th century BCE

This is a “neat” example of the established historians’ ‘classic’ mentality: Reserved when they write or talk about Minoans, even Hellenes, but garrulous when they lecture about Phoenicians. Indeed, why was it so difficult for the Aegean peoples to reach Iberia? They were surely not inferior to the Phoenicians in seamanship and, furthermore, Crete was far closer to Iberia compared to Phoenicia. In addition, who controlled Mediterranean trade at the time? The Phoenicians or the Mycenaeans? Why should the Egyptian trade items of this period found in Spain “almost surely be associated with Phoenician intermediaries”? The crucial question, however, this mentality does not answer is: Where did the Bronze Age Mediterranean find tin to produce bronze? Who were established as sea traders in those years to transport this precious metal to the Mediterranean? Alas, not the Phoenicians! It is the reason why the evidence of their presence in Iberia is anything but “convincing”… On the other hand, there are detailed descriptions of Minoans extracting metals from the area of Lake Superior and carrying them through the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico to be transported to the Mediterranean! One cannot exclude this, but we do not intend to take you that far. It is better to remain on Iberian soil.

Where did the Bronze Age Mediterranean find tin to produce bronze?
Who were established as sea traders in those years to transport this precious metal to the Mediterranean?

Los Millares, by Marianne Weil, cast bronze (2008)

Some ‘non-established’ historians link the distinctive culture of Los MillaresinAlmería with “The Early Minoan Colonization of Spain” (W. Sheppard Baird). Far more interesting is the following El Argar culture, which also flourished in Almería, in modern eastern Andalusia, between 1800 and 1300 BCE. The Argaric culture was characterized by the early adoption of bronze, which allowed local dominance over ‘copper age’ (chalcolithic) neighbours. Their mining and metallurgy were quite advanced, with bronze, silver and gold being mined and worked for weapons and jewelry. They developed sophisticated ceramic techniques, as well, and traded with other tribes.

Argaric gold sword

The collective burial tradition, typical of European Megalithic Culture, was abandoned in favour of individual burials (and the tholos or ‘beehive’ tombs in favour of small cists). This trend seems to have come from the eastern Mediterranean, most likely from Mycenaeans (skipping Sicily and Italy, where the collective burial tradition remained for some time yet). In the next phase of this culture, beginning ca 1500 BCE, burial in pithoi (large jars) became most frequent. Again this custom (that never reached beyond the Argarians’ circle) must have come from Hellas, where it was used after circa 2000 BCE. Cultural exchanges during the Mycenaean era are very clear in the Mediterranean, with the Argarians adopting Greek funerary customs, while the Hellenes also imported the Iberian tholos for the same purpose.

Note that whoever reached Iberia could easily find the way to the tin ores of Brittany and Cornwall through the Western Iberian Bronze cultures that had some degree of interaction, not just among them, but also with other Atlantic cultures in Britain, France, etc. It is the so-called Atlantic Bronze Age complex of ca 1300–700 BC that consisted of different civilizations in Portugal, Andalusia, Galicia, Armorica (the part of Gaul that included Brittany), and the British Isles. The Atlantic Bronze Age was marked by economic and cultural exchange, which led to a high degree of cultural affinity manifested in the coastal communities from Galicia to Scotland, while commercial contacts extended from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean.

Heracles fighting Geryon, ca 540 BCE

Next important culture was that of Tartessos, a harbour city and the surrounding region in the southern Iberian coast (southern Andalusia). It was the first organized state of the peninsula, developed culturally and politically by the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. The area is referred to in the Greek mythology of the era as a reminder of the Mycenaean presence and campaigns in Iberia. Heracles went to perform two labours there: to kill Geryon and obtain his cattle; and to steal the golden apples of the Hesperides.(a) Geryon dwelt on Erytheia or Erytheis, an island of the Hesperides in the ‘far west’ of the ancient world: Hesperia was the West and more precisely Iberia; Erytheia was called one of the Hesperides, but also the fearsome giant’s daughter. “Geryon was killed by the great strength of Heracles at sea-circled Erytheis”, Hesiod says in his Theogony. Heracles set up two massive spires of stone to stabilize the area and ensure the safety of ships sailing through the Straits, called the Pillars of Heracles. He also founded Gadeira on Geryon’s island, where the Phoenicians would build later the colony of Gadir (modern Cádiz): a tumulus near Gadeira was associated with Geryon’s final resting-place. There are also legends about Heracles being buried in Spain. A later generation of Hellenes linked the area to Tartessos. The Fortunate Isles, also called the Isles of the Blessed, or Elysium, were thought to be somewhere outside the Pillars of Heracles, as well.(b) As regards Geryon, he is mentioned among the mythical kings of Tartessos. His grandson Norax (or Norace) conquered the south of Sardinia, founding the city of Nora, and becoming a hero of the Nuragic mythology.(c) He dictated the first laws, divided the society into seven classes, and forced the nobles to work. Later Gárgoris introduced commerce, beekeeping and new agricultural tools such as the plow. This last innovation is also credited to his (grand)son, Habis (Habido, Abidis, or Abidas), who succeeded him in the kingdom of Tartessos.

Heracles with nymphs, a satyr, and Pan in the Garden of the Hesperides, by Hesperides Painter, hydria (water jar), ca early 4th century BCE

(a) The Hesperides (Ἑσπερίδες) in Hellenic mythology were nymphs very fond of singing, who tended a blissful garden in a far western corner of the world, located near the Atlas Mountains in northwestern Africa, at the edge of the encircling Oceanus, the world-ocean. They were said to be the daughters of Hesperus, which means the Evening Star of the planet Venus, equivalent to vesper. They were three (like other Greek triads: the Graces and the Moerae, Fates): Aegle (“dazzling light”), Arethusa (“waterer”), and Erytheia (or Erytheis, “red one”). The Garden of the Hesperides was Hera’s orchard in the Occident, where either a single tree or a grove of immortality-giving “golden apples” grew. In later years it was thought that they might have actually been oranges, a fruit unknown to Europe and the Mediterranean before the Middle Ages. Under this assumption, the Hellenic botanical name chosen for all citrus species was hesperidoeidē (“hesperidoids”) – implying that they came from the Occident, while in reality their origin was the Orient (Southeast Asia)…

A traditional Rabelo boat in the Douro used for centuries to transport people and goods, mainly wine

Some peoples name the orange after Portugal, the former main source of imports: Greek portokali (πορτοκάλι), Bulgarian and Slav-Macedonian portokal, Romanian portocală and Georgian phortokhali. Also in South Italian dialects, orange is portogallo or purtualle. Related names are found in non-European languages, as well: Turkish portakal, Arabic al-burtuqal, Persian porteghal, and Amharic (the Ethiopian language) birtukan. Portugal’s name derives from the Roman Portus Calethat evolved into Portugale during the 7th and 8th centuries. Cale was an early settlement located at the mouth of the Douro River in the north of what is now Portugal. The etymology of the name Cale is mysterious, as is the identity of the town’s founders. Some historians have argued that Hellenes were the first to settle Cale and the name derives from the Hellenic word kallos (‘κάλλος’), ‘beauty’, referring to the beauty of the Douro valley. However, the mainstream explanation is that it is an ethnonym derived from the Callaeci or Gallaeci that lived in the area. The same applies to the names Galicia and Gaia, the twin city of Porto, at the Douro mouth.

Macaronesia: the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries and Cape Verde

(b) In the Fortunate Isles, or Isles of the Blessed, heroes and other favoured mortals in Greek and Celtic mythology were received into a winterless blissful paradise. These islands were thought to lie in the ‘Western Ocean’ near the encircling ‘River Oceanus’. Strabo located them opposite ‘Maurusia’ (Mauritania, Western Sahara and Morocco), beyond the end of the world, where neither snow nor heavy rains ever fell, with the beneficially invigorating cool breath of Zephyrus constantly blowing. Plutarch, referring to these isles several times in his writings, located them firmly in the Atlantic a few days’ sail from Iberia:

“The islands are said to be two in number separated by a very narrow strait and lie [2,000 kilometers] from Africa… A firm belief has made its way, even to the barbarians, that here are the Elysian Fields and the abode of the Blessed of which Homer sang.”

(c) The close relations between Iberia and Sardinia implied by mythology are confirmed by archaeological, architectural, linguistic, cultural and historical evidence. On the other hand, the Sardinians had contacts with the Mycenaeans, who traded throughout the western Mediterranean, and the Cretans, e.g. with Kydonia, modern Chania, as shown from pottery recovered in excavations in Sardinia. The influences, though, seem to have been even wider. The stepped pyramid of Monte d’Accoddi, near Sassari, is somehow similar to the monumental complex of Los Millares in Andalusia and some later edifices in the Balearic Islands. Some scholars see similarities even with Mesopotamian structures and attribute them to migrations, particularly of Sumerians, to the West. Ancient Greek historians and geographers described the mysterious megalithic nuraghe as daedaleia, implying there was a connection with Daedalus, who, after working in Crete and building the labyrinth there, settled in Sicily and then in Sardinia. During the Chalcolithic period, in the dawn of the Nuragic civilization in the 18th century BCE, copper was used to make weapons and other items. Soon the island, rich in mines, notably copper and lead, saw the construction of numerous furnaces for the production of alloys traded across the Mediterranean, most probably by Minoans and, later on, by Mycenaeans. The Nuragic people became skilled metal workers and were among the main metal producers in Europe. Passing to the Bronze Age, they started using this new alloy to make a wide variety of products, such as weapons, tools, even votive offerings, e.g. bronze vessels that show their close relationship with the sea. Sardinia was not on the map of tin sources and trade in ancient times (Cornwall-Devon, Brittany, Iberia, Bohemia–Saxony). However, because of its other mineral wealth, it served as a centre for metals trade at that time and likely actively imported tin from Iberia for export to the rest of the Mediterranean. Therefore, traders from the Aegean, as well as other areas where tin was scarce, very often travelled there. This fact can explain the cultural influences on the Nuragic civilization from Mycenae, Crete and Cyprus, as well as the presence of late Bronze Age Mycenaean, Cretan and Cypriot ceramics, and also locally made replicas, in half a dozen findspots that seem to have functioned as “gateway” communities.

Sardinian and Corsican tribes: the Corsi, perhaps from Liguria, moved to Corsica from N. Sardinia; the Balearic Balares, from Iberia or S. France, may be related with the Basques; the Iolei may originate in N. Africa, Sicily or E. Mediterranean. The Gallurese, Logudorese and Campidanese dialects correspond probably to these tribes.

The late Bronze Age (15th–13th centuries BCE) saw vast population migrations, such as that of the Sea Peoples who destroyed the Mycenaean and the Hittite worlds and also attacked Egypt (see the previous Chronicle 5). Some scholars say that the Sherden, one of the most important tribes of the Sea Peoples, are to be identified with the Nuragic Sardinians, who settled on the island either before or after the failed invasion of Egypt. These theories remain controversial for most archaeologists and historians. Simonides of Ceos, however, in a lost work reported by Zenobius, spoke of raids by Sardinians against Crete during the Sea Peoples’ invasion of Egypt. This would at least confirm that Nuragic Sardinians frequented the eastern Mediterranean at that time. Further proof comes from 13th century Nuragic ceramics found at Tiryns and in the Sicilian Agrigento area, along the sea route linking the western to the eastern part of mare nostrum. The second largest island in the Mediterranean after Sicily was called Ichnousa by the Greeks. It was probably named Sardinia after Sardus, a mythical hero of the Nuragic pantheon, who colonized the island from Libya. He is also associated with the Heracleidae that settled there led by Iolaus, a nephew of Heracles, according to Diodorus Siculus. Iolaus may have given rise to the tribe of Iolei, Iolaensi or Iliensi, who were repeatedly checked by the Carthaginians and the Romans, but they were never subdued. He also founded many cities from the Black Sea area to Sicily and Sardinia, requesting the assistance of Daedalus. Some of the latter’s edifices were still standing in Diodorus’ time (1st century BCE). The Phoenicians finally appeared in the area for the first time around 1000 BCE and began visiting Sardinia with increasing frequency. The most common ports of call where they dropped anchor were Caralis, Nora, Bithia, Sulcis, Tharros, and Olbia. From the 8th century they started founding (or appropriating) strongholds and cities primarily on the strategic southwest coasts of the island.

Launeddas

Sardinia, along with neighbouring Corsica, is a special case in terms of music, as well, cultivating one of the oldest forms of vocal polyphony – perhaps as ancient as the polyphony of Epirus and Albania. Unesco classed this kind of song, called cantu a tenore, as intangible world heritage in 2005. A similar style, cantu a cuncordu, corresponds to the Corsican paghjella and is liturgic in nature. The polyphonic tradition extends to the instruments of music. A typical polyphonic woodwind instrument made of three pipes is the launeddas (also called ‘triple clarinet’ or ‘triplepipe’). The pipes are played with circular breathing and the sound may be continuous. One of the pipes functions as a drone and the other two play the melody in thirds and sixths. Predecessors of the launeddas can be traced back to approximately 2700 BCE in Egypt, where reed pipes, depicted on tomb reliefs and pyramids, were originally called memet. The launeddas date back to at least the 8th century BCE and are still played in religious ceremonies and dances (su ballu). The musicians use extensive variations on a few melodic phrases, and a single tune can last over an hour, producing some of the “most elemental and resonant (sounds) in European music”, as Alessio Surian observed.

Cynetic writing with a human figure, 8th century BCE

Gárgoris is mentioned as a mythological king of one of the peoples of Tartessos, who lived in today’s Algarve and Low Alentejo of southern Portugal. They were the Cynetes, Cynesioi or Conii, the westernmost dwellers of Europe, according to Herodotus, who distinguished them from the Celts. Gárgoris, as the legend goes, had incestuous relations with his daughter, whose name has not survived. After she had got pregnant, he ordered that she should be locked up and the child be killed. The baby was abandoned on a hill close to a lair of wild animals, which instead breast-fed and protected him. When Gárgoris learned that his (grand)son was still alive, he ordered that he should be taken away from the cave and put to death in another way: in a stampede of cows, or devoured by dogs or hungry pigs, or thrown to the sea. Protected by Fortune, Habis managed to survive against all adversities. Raised by a hind and grown up like a savage, he became a skilful bandit, but was captured by peasants who led him to the king. Seeing his birthmarks, Gárgoris recognized he was his (grand)son. Impressed by his miraculous survival of all his ordeals, the king named him heir to the throne. Recorded by the Roman historian Trogus Pompeius, the legend was narrated in verse by Jerónimo de Arbolanche in his poem Abidas (1566). There are other versions of the myth, as well. In one of them Gárgoris is identified with Cronus eating his children, while his (grand)son is presented as persecuted for he introduced agriculture in pastoral Tartessos. A third variation, which found quite unexpectedly its way into a book about fado, covers up the incest factor, but embellishes the story with our cherished Homeric heroes (see also Voyage 3: Iberia’s Odyssey):

Map of the Lisbon area with Olisipo, Sintra, Escalabis or Scalabis, and Salacia, an ancient Roman town in present-day Alcácer do Sal

Gárgoris is identified with the Iberian king Gregoris mentioned by Mascarenhas Barreto in his bookFado – Lyrical Origins and Poetic Motivation.In his numerous mythological and historical digressional footnotes, he connects this monarch to Odysseus and Calypso, referring to the founding of Lisbon and Santarém:

“Legend attributes the building of the ancient walls of the city [Lisbon] to the great Greek hero of antiquity, Ulysses, king of Ithaca and conqueror of Troy, who is supposed to have given the place the name of Ulissea – whence the word Ulissipo. Anyway, what is certain is that Lisbon was inhabited by the Phoenicians around 600 BC and they named it Alis Ubbo, meaning ‘Calm Bay’.”

The founding of Santarém is thought to be correlated to that of Ulissea > Ulissipo > Olissipo > Olissipona > Lissibona > Lisboa.

“It is believed to have been founded in the 10th century BC by Abidis, of Greek origin, who gave it the name of Esca-Abidis”,Mascarenhas Barreto writes. “According to legend, this prince, grandson of Gregoris, king of the Iberian Peninsula, was also the son of Ulysses who, betraying the trust of Gregoris after having been given Alis Ubbo (Lisbon), secretly espoused Calypso, daughter of the peninsular king, who rushed with his army on Lisbon. Ulysses fled by sea, abandoning his spouse. When Abidis was born, Gregoris ordered him to be thrown in a cave to be devoured by wild beasts. In answer, however, to the entreaties of his daughter, he consented that the child should be delivered to Fate, according to primitive custom, and Abidis was put in a basket and taken away by the current of the river [Tagus]. A hind adopted him and when the child was later found in a wild state by some huntsmen, his mother recognized him by a mark. Gregoris forgot his former anger and gave him schooling, so that he could succeed him in the government of the peninsula. The name Esca-Abidis (Escalabis) in Greek means ‘food of Abidis’ in memory of the place where he was reared by the hind.”

“Legend attributes the building of the ancient walls of Lisbon to Ulysses, who is supposed to have given the place the name of Ulissea – whence Olissipo, Lissibona and Lisboa… Santarém is believed to have been founded in the 10th century BC by Abidis, of Greek origin [son of Ulysses and Calypso], who gave it the name of Esca-Abidis (Escalabis)… (Mascarenhas Barreto)

Once more, the stories about Hellenes are ‘legends’, those on Phoenicians ‘history’. Possibly true, there were no Greek settlements west of the Pillars of Heracles, only voyages of discovery. The myth of an ancient Hellenic foundation of Olisipo by Odysseus is not true. On the other hand, there is no evidence either to support the myth of a Phoenician foundation of Lisbon “around 600” or as far back as 1200 BCE under the name of Alis Ubbo (“Safe Harbour”), even if there were some organized settlements in Olissipona with clear Mediterranean influences either at that distant time or later. Likewise, contrary to myth, except the voyages of discovery, there is no record of Phoenician colonies beyond the Algarve, namely Balsa and Tavira, close to the Portuguese-Spanish border, with substantial Phoenician settlement and influence since the 8th century BCE. Essentially, Phoenician influence in modern Portugal was through cultural and commercial exchange with Tartessos.

As regards Calypso, according to the Greek mythology, she was not a princess but a nymph on the island of Ogygia, daughter of Atlas, hence she was also called Atlantis (Homer); or an Oceanid, that is, a daughter of Oceanus (Hesiod).(d) However, both versions are linked with either the Pillars of Heracles area or the Atlantic Ocean. Atlas, the Titan who held up the celestial sphere, was identified with the Atlas Mountains in northwest Africa. Scholars who have examined Homer’s work and geography, among them Strabo and Plutarch, have suggested that Ogygia and/or Scheria, the Phaeacians’ island, were located in the Atlantic, and some have identified either or both with Atlantis. Plutarch again writes specifically that “an isle Ogygian lies far out at sea, distant five days’ sail from Britain, going westwards”, and also mentions “the great continent”, which was interpreted as a reference to either America or an allusion to Plato’s Atlantis. Many traits of the Phaeacians, including their seamanship, are suggestive of either Minoan Crete or Atlantis. The description of their palace is that of a very advanced civilization. Above all, their ships were superb, quite different from the galleys of the Trojan War, and… steered by thought!(e) Hence the view that it was Homer before Plato who first spoke of Atlantis.

(d) Ogygia is linked to the Ogygian deluge and the mythical king of Attica and/or Boeotia, Ogyges, in the sense that Ogygian means ‘primeval’, ‘primal’, ‘at earliest dawn’. This means that Calypso’s island was primeval. Thus, when Aeschylus calls the NileOgygian, he does not suggest that the island was in Egypt, as some thoughtlessly thought…

(e) Homer describes the ships as faster than falcons, while King Alcinous explains to Odysseus what sort of information the ships require in order to take him home:

“Tell me your country, nation, and city, that our ships may shape their purpose accordingly and take you there. For the Phaeacians have no pilots; their vessels have no rudders as those of other nations have, but the ships themselves understand what it is that we are thinking about and want; they know all the cities and countries in the whole world, and can traverse the sea just as well even when it is covered with mist and cloud, so that there is no danger of being wrecked or coming to any harm.”

Back to Tartessos. This legendary land appears in Greek and Near Eastern sources circa the middle of the 1st millennium BCE. Most probably Homer was again the first one to refer in the Iliad to a gold-bearing land in the western limits of the world before the great ocean (Iberia) where wealthy people lived happily for many years. The Tartessian fortunate city, according to Herodotus, was beyond the Pillars of Heracles and had a king named Arganthonios, because of his wealth most probably.(f)

(f) The word Arganthonios is apparently based on the Indo-European word for silver and hence money. Tartessos was very rich in silver. Similar names appear in inscriptions of the Roman period and on silver coinage in Gaul. Arganthonios, the ‘Silver Man’ (ca 670–550 BCE), ruled Tartessos for 80 years (ca 630-550) and lived to be 120 years old. The idea of great age and length of reign may result from a succession of kings using the same name or title. Nevertheless, one could retort that he died… quite young, if we take into account that, as the Bible says, “all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine [969] years”!

Another historian, Ephorus, described in the 4th century BCE “a very prosperous market called Tartessos, with much tin carried by river, as well as gold and copper from Celtic lands.” Around the end of the millennium, however, there are indications that the name fell out of use creating the impression that the city might have been lost due to natural or other causes. Apart from Thera, Tartessos is a strong candidate for the site of Atlantis. The two of them had probably more in common, namely Minoan influences. The Andalusians, just like the Hellenes, may have benefited from the Cretans not only economically, but culturally, as well. Archaeological discoveries there have built up a picture of a widespread culture, with the core area extending from the Guadalquivir valley to Huelva, but also covering the entire southern Iberia, from the mouth of the Tagus to Valencia. Pausanias, writing in the 2nd century CE, identified the river and gave details of the location of the city:

“They say that Tartessos is a river in the land of the Iberians, running down into the sea by two mouths, and that between these two mouths lies a city of the same name. The river is the largest in Iberia, and tidal, that of a later day called Baetis”, named Guadalquivir (‘Great River’) even later by the Moors.

The eastern mouth of the river, the only one existing now, was much wider at that time. The western mouth does not exist anymore, but it is thought that it was located near Huelva. In this area we now find only a number of lakes. At that time, between these two river arms, there was a large lagoon with at least one island in it where the legendary city was probably located. The landscape is completely different now. Some findings lead to the conclusion that there must have been two natural disasters (tsunamis) that caused the islands and the dry areas to sink, one of which happened around 1500 BCE and the other in 200 CE. Therefore, none of them is linked with the demise of Tartessos. Most sites were inexplicably abandoned between the late 6th and early 5th centuries BCE.

Geography of Tartessos and Iberia; 7th-5th century BCE

Strabo described an urbanized society with many flourishing, wealthy cities along the banks of the Tartessos (Guadalquivir) River. The Tartessians were very good in engineering, with a sophisticated system to regulate the river flow.

“They are considered to be the most educated of the Iberians, they have a scripture, even historical chronicles, poems, and laws in verse”, he wrote.(g)

(g) More about the ancient nomoi, that is, the very old tradition of laws in verse meant to be sung so as not to be forgotten by the people, see Chronicle 1.

Their culture is divided into two periods: The first is called “geometric” and coincides with the late Bronze Age ranging from 1200 to 750 BCE – exactly corresponding to the Greek geometric art (Parallel Lives? Who knows…). The second is termed “oriental”, influenced by Phoenicians and Hellenes alike, ranging from 750 to 550 BCE, when it was superseded by the classic Iberian culture. A similar shift to the Lusitanian culture occurred in the southern Portuguese territory, mainly in the Algarve and Low Alentejo, with littoral extensions up to the Tagus mouth. Significant elements of the period were the introduction of the potter’s wheel, and other major advances in craftsmanship, e.g. architecture, and also in agriculture. Another noticeable element was the increase in specialization and stratification. A very important development was writing. With the arrival of the Hellenes, whose influence extended far beyond their colonies, this ‘orientalism’ began to transform itself into the Iberian culture, especially in the South East. The Greek influence is visible in the gradual change of the style of the monuments approaching more and more the architectural models of the Hellenic world. The Iberian script evolved from the Tartessian with noticeable Greek influences. A variant of the Hellenic alphabet (Ibero-Ionian script) was used in a few cases to write Iberian, as well.

Culture (from Cicero’s “cultura animi”) is also material, denoting the artifacts a society creates and their connection to social relations. Civilization is certainly inconceivable without division of labour and technology. Culture and civilization necessitate an economic base in order to thrive. In the case of Iberia, it was the metals that opened the way to the dawn of the Bronze Age, sped up later when some Easterners arrived there. Mining and smelting preceded the coming of Minoans, Greeks, or Phoenicians. Alluvial tin was panned in the Tartessian streams from an early date. The Río Tinto mines along the river, which flows into the Gulf of Cádiz at Huelva, are estimated at 8,000 to 10,000 years old. They have been mined for copper, silver, gold, and other minerals by Iberians, Tartessians, Phoenicians, Hellenes, Romans, Visigoths, Moors and Spaniards, for such a long time that the place has turned into an environmental disaster zone.(h) The invention of coinage in the 7th century BCE intensified the search for bronze and silver. Hence trade links, formerly largely in elite goods, assumed a broader economic role. By that time, silver extraction in Huelva Province reached industrial proportions. Huelva city was certainly connected to Tartessos; it contains the largest accumulation of imported elite goods and must have been an important centre. Excavations in the heart of the city revealed a great industrial and commercial emporium lasting several centuries. Some 90,000 ceramic fragments, indigenous and imported (Phoenician and Greek), were exhumed. This pottery, dated from the 10th to the 8th centuries BCE, precedes finds from other Phoenician emporia. The existence of foreign produce and materials together with local ones permits us to imagine its old harbour as a major hub for the reception, manufacture and shipping of diverse products of various and distant origin. Finds in other parts of the city help us estimate its habitat in some 20 hectares, which constitutes a sizable extension for a site in Iberia during that period. The analysis of written sources and the products exhumed, including thousands of Hellenic ceramics, some of which are works of excellent quality by known potters and painters, tends to identify this habitat with the lost city of Tartessos.

Río Tinto: beautiful colours but… poisonous!

(h) The Tinto area, after its exploitation for ten millennia, looks like a “lunar landscape” or even worse: Recently it has gained scientific interest due to the presence of so-called extremophileaerobic bacteria that dwell in the water. The extreme conditions there may be analogous to other locations in the solar system thought to contain liquid water, such as subterranean Mars, or Jupiter’s moon Europa, where an acidic ocean of water is theorized to exist under its ice surface. Thus the river is of interest to astrobiologists.

El Corazón de la Tierra: the Heart of the Earth (uprooted)

Based partially on research done near the Río Tinto, two NASA scientists reported in 2005 they had found strong evidence of present life on Mars! They were obliged to retract, but who knows? The Americans may one day employ… Martians as slaves! That is why Europe, eternally in the role of a satellite, is already being transmuted into… Europa, moving inexorably towards the gates of El Dorado vigilantly guarded by Cerberus!

THE MINOAN civilization, as part of the Aegean cultures in the Bronze Age, arose in the island of Crete, flourished from the 27th to the 15th centuries BCE and then vanished. It came to light again at the outset of the 20th century CE thanks to the British archaeologist Arthur Evans. The term Minoan refers to the legendary Minos. We presume, on no evidence, that it was not a name but a royal title. In the Odyssey, composed centuries after the demise of the Minoans, Homer calls the natives of the island Eteocretans (‘true Cretans’); probably they were true descendants of the Minoans. In addition, there were several settlements in the Aegean and the Ionian Seas, as well as in Sicily and Canaan, known by the name Minoa. The root min- appears in some Aegean languages, toponyms and in the name of the Minyans, an autochthonous people inhabiting the Aegean. We assume that the Cretans were not Indo-Europeans, but a Mediterranean people related to the Pelasgians – the pre-Hellenic dwellers of the Aegean region – and possibly to the Minyans. Crete remained free from invasions for many centuries, and managed to develop an independent and distinct civilization, one of the most advanced in the Mediterranean area during the Bronze Age, together with that of Egypt. Linear A, the Minoan script, has not yet been deciphered; it possibly represents an Aegean language, not related to any Indo-European tongue.

The Ship Procession or the Flotilla frieze at Acroteri, Thera (detail)

“Crete was well placed in relation to sea trading routes”, Eugene Hirschfeld comments, writing on “Grace in the Aegean: the art of the Minoans”. “Thucydides wrote that Minos was the first to build a navy:
‘The first person known to us by tradition as having established a navy is Minos. He made himself master of what is now called the Hellenic sea, and ruled over the Cyclades, into most of which he sent the first colonies… and thus did his best to put down piracy in those waters, a necessary step to secure the revenues for his own use.’“With their merchant fleet, the Minoans came to dominate the seas, sailing for hundreds of miles in search of trade, from Spain in the west to Syria in the east…(a) It is possibly a measure of both the Minoans’ geographical isolation and the strength of their fleet that their coastal towns seem to have had few fortifications. Thus their period of ascendancy was called by Arthur Evans the Pax Minoica or ‘Minoan peace’ – a time when cities needed no walls.(b) Like Pax Romana, of course, such a peace if it existed would have been the product of military strength rather than pacifism.”

Replica of the Uluburun shipwreck

(a) “We should never under-estimate how ‘joined up’ the ancient world was”,Hirschfeldfootnotes. “See for example the late Bronze Age shipwreck, which was carrying a remarkable assortment of international goods from northern Europe, Africa and Mesopotamia”.The ship revealed one of the most spectacular late Bronze Age assemblages to have emerged from the Mediterranean, dated to the late 14th century BCE. It was similar to Graeco-Roman vessels of a later time and was found in 1982 by a sponge diver in south-western Asia Minor.

(b) Though Evans’ vision of a Pax Minoica has been criticized recently, it seems there was little armed conflict in the island itself until the following Mycenaean period. Archaeologists say the Minoans often show weapons in their art, but only in ritual contexts. Claims that they produced no weapons are erroneous; Minoan swords were the finest in all of the Aegean. Furthermore, no evidence exists for a Minoan army, or domination of peoples outside Crete.

The Dolphins mural at Knossos

One after the other, the unique features of this marvellous civilization seem to arise from only one: the Minoans’ thalassocracy, their “geographical isolation and the strength of their fleet”, as Hirschfeld says and then explains:

“As a maritime trading civilization, it is unsurprising that the Minoans left us some beautiful fresco images of their ships, wooden sailing vessels superior to any others on the Mediterranean. Perhaps because of this fleet and the protecting seas, military images are unusual in Minoan art. Until the attacks by the Mycenaeans in 1450 BC, there is no real evidence that the Minoans fought wars with any other culture. This is in stark contrast to their contemporaries: the city states of Mesopotamia were constantly at war, celebrating their exploits on such works as the Stele of the Vultures, and Egypt covered tomb walls with images of military pomp. The Minoans preferred leisurely scenes or sports. They loved to decorate walls with murals of dolphins, flowers and fish. Their art has a grace, movement and exuberance distinct from the art of Egypt and Sumer, and… their craftsmanship is second to none.”

This civilization is an astonishing paradox: A great power without a military aristocracy; a palace that was not a royal residence and neither the king was glorified; a religion with no grandeur, while women were equal to men and free – or so it seems.

The Palace of Minos (or the Labyrinth of Minotaur to Greek eyes)

This civilization is an astonishing paradox, indeed: A great power without a military aristocracy; a palace that was not a royal residence and neither the king was glorified; a religion with no grandeur, while women were equal to men and free – or so it seems:

“The Minoans were skilled and sensitive architects, and the palaces count amongst their greatest works of art. The most famous is the palace at Knossos, often called the ‘Palace of Minos’. A multi-storey complex of corridors, rooms and staircases built around a central courtyard, the palace boasted impressive plumbing as well as lovely frescos, columns and gardens. Visitors found its ‘agglutinative’ architecture of over 1000 rooms so confusing that it is thought to have inspired the myth of the Minotaur’s Labyrinth. Knossos was an entire community, a centre for religion, pottery production and storage of trade goods, and a venue for festivals. For this reason the term ‘palace’ is not adequate for describing these Minoan complexes.”

Sacred symbols: bull and labrys

“Sitting at the apex of a trading empire, the Cretan kings were extremely wealthy. It is therefore interesting that they appear to have ordered no sculpture, memorials, king-lists or other works to boast of their power and status… We find nothing like the mighty monuments to the god-kings of Egypt. We have no record either of a king Minos or of any other named monarch, male or female… Historian R. F. Willetts has suggested that the apparent modesty of the Minoan aristocracy can be explained by a difference in religious emphasis: the Minoans did not seek to associate the king with the immortal gods, like the Egyptians or Mesopotamians, but rather worshiped a particular vision of nature. From this standpoint, images glorifying the king were unnecessary.”

Minoan Snake Goddess

“Women seem to have enjoyed higher status in Minoan culture than was usual in the Bronze Age… They served as administrators and priestesses… Women’s relative equality may be because of the absence of military threat, giving far less impetus to the development of a male warrior discourse and thus a greater role and respect for women. It is tempting when looking at images of young women somersaulting over bulls with the men to conclude that women enjoyed considerable freedom… As for religion, Minoan art provides us with faience figurines of a ‘snake goddess’, and frescos… on which women priests outnumber men. No images of male deities have been found from the peak of Minoan civilization. The apparent prominence of women in Minoan religion has led to conjecture that the principal deity or deities of Minoan Crete may have been female, e.g. an earth or mother goddess.”

A Minoan beauty on Thera

What conclusions can we draw?

“Minoan art does show a greater emphasis on spontaneity and invention, and is more secular and informal… less constrained by rigid conventions and geometry”, Eugene Hirschfeld writes. “The absence of battles, kings, boastful inscriptions and historical events in its art is surprising for the time. We need to recognize such distinctions without falling into the crude formulations sometimes used in the past, such as posing cultured Minoans against barbarous Mycenaeans. Arnold Hauser’s first explanation for the particular character of the Minoans’ art is the relatively modest role of religion in their society. Minoan shrines seem to have been small, even in the palaces, kept in people’s homes or built in out of the way places like hills and caves. There is nothing like the great cult of the dead seen in Egypt, or the grandiose works that went with it. There was therefore less impetus towards sternly imposed conventions. He also admires the urbanity of the cultural life that arose around the palaces: ‘The freedom of Cretan art can also be partly explained by the extraordinarily important role which city life and commerce played in the island’s economy… city life was probably nowhere so highly developed as in Crete’. The ‘palace’ was the centre of Minoan life: of trade and agriculture, but also of art. It was perhaps this union of trade and culture in a context of long internal stability that gave Minoan art its urbane liveliness. Crete’s geopolitical situation may also have exerted an influence. With the natural protection of the sea and backed by their fleet, the Minoans had little need to fear invasion. In the absence of a warrior class, not only were women’s rights better than in most Bronze Age cultures, but art was less constrained by the military and religion.”

“The absence of battles, kings, boastful inscriptions and historical events in Minoan art is surprising for the time… It was perhaps this union of trade and culture in a context of long internal stability that gave Minoan art its urbane liveliness.” (Eugene Hirschfeld)

Theran antelopes

The influence of the Minoan civilization outside Crete manifests itself in the presence of Minoan handicrafts on the Greek mainland. After around 1700 BCE, the material culture of the Hellenes achieved a new, higher, level due to Minoan influence. Connections between Crete and Egypt were prominent. Minoan wares were found there, while several Egyptian items were imported, especially papyrus, as well as artistic ideas. The Egyptian hieroglyphs served as a model for the Minoan pictographic writing, from which the Linear A writing system developed. The Minoan palaces were later occupied by the Mycenaeans (late 15th–early 14th century BCE) who adapted the Minoan Linear A script to the needs of their own language, a form of Greek, which was written in Linear B.(c) The Mycenaeans generally tended to adapt rather than destroy Cretan culture, religion and art, and they continued to operate the economic system and bureaucracy of the Minoans. After about a century of partial recovery, most Cretan cities and palaces went into decline in the 13th century BCE. When the Bronze Age came crashing down some time later, Crete did not feel the agony of death.

The mysterious Disc of Phaestos (Phaistos Disk)

(c) “It is very likely that writing arose in Minoan culture for the same reason it did in Sumer: to keep accounts”, Hirschfeld notes. “An early pictographic script… was replaced in around 1700 BC by one which represented sounds, i.e. a true alphabet, known as Linear A… It has still not been deciphered… If there is imaginative literature among these writings, we cannot read it. We have no Minoan poetry, no songs, no history, no scripture. It is a great culture, but a silent one… One of archaeology’s more mysterious objects is the Phaistos [or Phaestos] Disc… A fired clay disc, it is covered on both sides with spirals of stamped symbols… They belong to none of the writing systems mentioned above.”
The disc (15 cm wide) is unique because all these symbols seem to have been impressed into the clay using 45 stamps, reproducing a body of text with reusable characters. German typographer and linguist Herbert Brekle argues that the disc is an early document of movable type printing, because it meets the essential criteria of typography, while Jared Diamond described it as “by far the earliest printed document in the world”. Discovered by the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier in the palace of Phaistos in 1908, it captured the imagination of amateurs and professionals, and many attempts have been made to decipher it – but in vain…

A Theran fisherman

The Minoans were traders, and their cultural contacts reached far beyond Crete – to copper-bearing Cyprus and Asia Minor (Anatolia), Egypt and Canaan (the Levant), the Balkans and the Black Sea area, especially Colchis (Georgia/Abkhazia), Mesopotamia and even faraway Afghanistan. Paintings in Thebes, Egypt, from the 15th century BCE depict a number of Minoans bearing gifts. Inscriptions record these people as coming from the “islands in the midst of the sea”, and may refer to gift-bringing merchants or officials from Crete. Minoan techniques and styles in ceramics also provided models for Helladic Greece. Along with Thera, Cretan ‘colonies’ can be found on Cythera, an island close to the mainland that came under Minoan influence in the 3rd millennium and remained Minoan in culture for a thousand years, until the Mycenaean occupation in the 13th century, as well as in Melos, Kea, Aegina, Rhodes and Miletus. The Cyclades and the Dodecanese were in the Cretan cultural orbit.

Certain locations within Crete emphasize it as an ‘outward looking’ society. The palace of Kato Zakros,e.g., is located within a bay, 100 metres from the modern shore-line. Its large number of workshops and the richness of its site materials indicate a centre for import and export. Such activities are elaborated in artistic representations of the sea with ships and sailors, e.g. the Flotilla fresco on Thera. Homer recorded a tradition that Crete had 90 cities. Multi-room constructions were found even in the ‘poor’ areas, revealing a social equality and even distribution of wealth derived through trade. There was a high degree of organization, with no trace of the military aristocracies that characterized the following civilizations. While the Mycenaeans relied mainly on conquest to expand, the Minoans were a mercantile people engaged primarily in overseas trade. No doubt they should have been involved in the Bronze Age’s most crucial trade of tin: tin, alloyed with copper, obviously from Cyprus, was used to make bronze.(d) The Minoan decline seems to be correlated with the decline in the use of bronze tools in favour of iron ones.

The entire Ship Procession or Flotilla frieze at Acroteri, Thera

Multi-room constructions were discovered even in the ‘poor’ areas, revealing a social equality and even distribution of wealth derived through trade. There was a high degree of organization, with no trace of the military aristocracies that characterized the following civilizations…

A Thracian bronze deer, 9th-6th century BCE

(d) Bronze was initially made from naturally or artificially mixed ores of copper and arsenic. That is why it was called arsenic bronze. Tin was used only later, becoming the sole type of major non-copper ingredient of bronze in the late 3rd millennium. Tin bronze was superior in that the alloying process could be easily controlled and the alloy was stronger and easier to cast. Moreover, unlike arsenic, tin is not toxic. The earliest tin-alloy bronzes date to the late 4th millennium in Iran, Mesopotamia and China. Copper and tin ores are rarely found together (exceptions include one ancient site in Iran); thus, serious bronze work has always involved trade. The major source for tin in Europe was England’s deposits of ore in Cornwall, traded as far as the eastern Mediterranean. Though bronze is generally harder than wrought iron, the Bronze Age gave way to the Iron Age because iron was easier to find and to process into a poor grade of metal. Bronze was still used in the Iron Age. Roman officers, e.g., had bronze swords while foot soldiers had iron. Archaeologists suspect that a serious disruption of the tin trade precipitated the transition. The mass population migrations ca 1200-1100 BCE reduced the shipping of tin around the Mediterranean (and from Britain), limiting supplies and raising prices. As cultures advanced from wrought to machine forged iron, they learned how to make steel, which is stronger than bronze and holds a sharper edge longer. There are many bronze alloys but modern bronze is typically 88% copper and 12% tin. Historical ‘bronzes’ are highly variable in composition, as most metalworkers probably used whatever scrap was on hand.

Pre-Columbian “birdman”, tumbaga

Orichalcumis mentioned in several ancient writings, most notably in the story of Atlantis as recounted in Plato’s Critias dialogue. It is first mentioned by Hesiod in the 7th century BCE and in a Homeric hymn dedicated to Aphrodite. Plato says that the metal was considered second only to gold in value. By his time, however, it was known only by name. Pliny the Elder points out that it has lost currency due to the mines being exhausted. The name derives from the Hellenic ορείχαλκος (from όρος, ‘mountain’ and χαλκός, ‘copper’). Plato’s orichalcum has been held to be either a gold-copper alloy, or a metal no longer known or mythic like Atlantis. The Romans transliterated ‘orichalcum’ as ‘aurichalcum’, which was thought to literally mean ‘gold copper’. The Andean alloy tumbaga fits the same description, being a gold-copper alloy. In Virgil’s Aeneid, a gold-silver alloy is mentioned. In later years, orichalcum was used to describe the sulfide mineral chalcopyrite or brass, that is, a copper-iron or copper-zinc alloy. The colour of brass is generally golden-yellow, while that of bronze is brown-red.

Once I had the naïve impression – based on a mechanistic perception of the succession of historical ages (where what comes next is “deterministically superior” to what has preceded it) – that the Iron Age was superior in every aspect to the Bronze Age. Generally this is true. But there are some anomalies, some logical paradoxes, especially at the beginning of the new age, since you have to accept that the “iron” Dorians were more civilized than the “bronze” Achaeans. A similar sham, by the way, is the idea of the “superiority” of monotheism versus polytheism, while in reality it is a huge setback – and the Christian obscurantism of the Dark Ages proves it: When everyone claims the exclusivity or monopoly of truth, when polytheistic tolerance is lost, then the result is… Jerusalem as the capital not of Israel but of hatred between monotheists! Anyway, there are more “historical ironies” in the succession of ages. Since the Iron Age is superior to the Bronze Age, then it is logical to think that iron itself is superior to bronze – which, as we have seen, is not true. The iron weapons, made out of necessity, were the “weapons of the poor”. Thus the aristocratic monopoly on the conduct of war ceased. One could argue that “war was democratized”. But is the right to kill a “democratic” right?(!)

Cretan gold ring: four women with long robes and bare breasts in a ‘cult scene’, ca 1500 BCE

The Mediterranean copper island was Cyprus; the word copper comes from the name of the island: from the Latin phrase Cyprium (aes), ‘Cyprian (metal)’. A possible etymological origin of the name Cyprus is the Sumerian words for copper or bronze(zubar/kubar), due to the massive deposits of copper ore found in the island. But where did the Minoans find tin, the necessary component to produce bronze? Tin is very rare in the eastern Mediterranean. The only known source of cassiterite in the area was Kestel-Göltepe in the Taurus Mountains of south-central Anatolia. It supplied tin from the late 4th millennium to the mid-19th century BCE, when the ores became uneconomical or ran out. There were three other sources of tin available to the Minoan traders: the distant northeastern Afghanistan, central Europe (Bohemia), and the West, with vast amounts of tin in places such as Iberia, Brittany in northwestern France, and especially Cornwall in southwestern Britain. For the seafaring Cretans, the Occident was the destination they possibly preferred best. And when the mines in Taurus had shut down, Western tin became more important and the Minoans would have totally monopolized the supply of tin into the Eastern Mediterranean with their navy and shipping. Objects made by Minoans suggest there was an extensive network with mainland Greece, Anatolia, Cyprus, Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and westwards as far as Iberia, and even further, that is, Bohemia, Brittany and, of course, Cornwall. Trade in nearby lands was direct, while in distant places could also be indirect, through middlemen. Undoubtedly, the Cretan ships should have transported British tin. If they also dropped anchor in British harbours is another story.

Where did the Minoans find tin, the necessary component to produce bronze? Undoubtedly, the Cretan ships should have transported British tin. If they also dropped anchor in British harbours is another story.

The blue monkeys fresco on Thera

The Cretans derived their surplus from trade, unlike Babylon and Egypt that mainly relied on agriculture. They were the unrivalled long-distance traders, masters of the sea routes, having developed the most advanced navy that had ever been seen. They traded not only their own manufactured goods ‘Made in Crete’, such as ceramics and metalwork, but also acted as intermediaries, trading raw materials and finished products throughout the Mediterranean and beyond. Their most valuable re-exports were pottery, copper, tin, gold, and silver. They were active not only in the East, but also in the West, founding emporia all around. Their most privileged trade contacts in the Orient were certainly those with the Egyptians, while their most significant Occidental partners should have been the Iberians, as the peninsula was rich in metals, especially silver, but also tin. Trade in tin was very lucrative in the Bronze Age, because, as we have seen, it is an essential component of true bronze, and comparatively rare: only gold and silver are rarer. Apart from the cassiterite deposits in Iberia, the locals obviously knew where the Cassiterides were.(e)

(e)The Cassiterides, that is, the Tin Islands (from the Greek word for tin: cassíteros), were thought to be situated somewhere near the west coasts of Europe. Ancient writers (Strabo, Posidonius, Diodorus Siculus, etc) described them as islets off northwest Iberia. Dionysios Periegetes (i.e. the Voyager) mentioned them in connection with the mythical Hesperides. Stesichorus and Strabo wrote that the Hesperides were in legendary Tartessos (where we shall voyage in due time). Nevertheless, the traditional assumption, if we ignore all information from the ancient writers, is that the Cassiterides refer to the British Isles as a whole, based on the significant tin deposits in Cornwall in the past (these deposits have now become very limited due to overexploitation for millennia…).

Juanito Apinani‘s speed and bravery in the bullring of Madrid,
from the etchings “La Tauromaquia” by Francisco Goya (1815-16)

The metals were just the beginning of a far broader economical and cultural exchange. A lot of Iberians e.g. are nowadays intrigued by the fact that so long ago the Minoans were practicing their own version of ‘bullfights’. In his bilingual book (in Portuguese and English) “Fado– Lyrical Origins and Poetic Motivation”,Mascarenhas Barreto refers to the Neolithichuntingrituals as a possible origin of bull-leaping(“pegas”) and wonders “whether the peoples of the Iberian Peninsula learnt this from the Cretans of the 3rd millennium BC or if they themselves may have been the teachers, since the bulls were taken from their natural habitat in the peninsula to the island of Crete” (see also Voyage 3: Iberia’s Odyssey).(f) But, when one speaks of such extensive exchanges taking place in the 3rd millennium BCE, with customs adopted and bulls transported so far away, is it really so important to know who imitated whom?

Mascarenhas Barreto wonders “whether the peoples of the Iberian Peninsula learnt [bull-leaping] from the Cretans of the 3rd millennium BC or if they themselves may have been the teachers, since the bulls were taken from their natural habitat in the peninsula to the island of Crete.”

Ταυροκαθάψια (bull-leaping) depicted on a Knossos fresco

(f) Bull-leaping was a Minoan ritual connected with bull worship where, contrary to bullfight, the bull was not killed. It passed to the Mycenaeans and was called ταυροκαθάψια in Greek; from ταῦρος (“bull”) and κάθαψις, a rare noun composed of the words κατα– (“across”) and ἅπτομαι(“touch, reach”); thus, literally, “touching of the bull”. Representations (frescoes, statuettes, seals) of the ritual, outside Crete and the Peloponnese, have been found in Asia Minor (Smyrna and Hattusa), in Canaan, Egypt, Bactria, and the Indus Valley.

Non-violent bull-leaping has been practiced in Spain known as recortes. The recortadores competed at dodging and leaping over bulls without cape or sword. Some used a long pole to literally pole-vault over the charging animal, which was not restrained by any guiding rope or similar safety device. The recortes were common in the 19th century. Etchings by painter Francisco de Goya depict these events.

In neighbouring Portugal, the bullfight’s second stage, called pega (“holding”), was the one referred to by Barreto. Then the so-called forcados challenged the animal directly without protection or weapon of defense. The front man provoked the bull into a charge to perform a pega de cara(face grab), secured its head and was aided by his fellows who surrounded and subdued the animal. The bull was not killed in the ring, in the audience’s sight, but by a butcher. Some bulls, after an exceptional performance, were healed, released to pasture until their end days and used for breeding.

A ‘safer’ style of this ritual practiced in French Gascony used young cows instead of bulls, which were furthermore guided by long ropes attached to their horns, so that they ran directly towards the sauteurs(“leapers”) and écarteurs(“dodgers”), and were restrained from trampling or goring them should they miss a trick.

In faraway South India, in Tamil Nadu, there was a related ritual, the jallikattu, as part of the harvest celebration. The participants tried to leap onto a bull, reaching for the money packets tied to its horns as a prize. The event has been depicted in rock art dated at least to the 3rd century BCE.